Tiny Awful Moments

Mike’s hair started to fall out last Tuesday, and the next day we went to visit a cousin with clippers and she did the close-crop honors.

Now Mike has a slightly dangerous air. He looks like a mercenary on holidays. Like there might be a concealed weapon under that baggy tee shirt. Like the red smudges around his eyes might be due to too much late-night whiskey in a dark and seedy bar. Mike looks like a hard-living bad boy.

As far as I can tell, losing his hair hasn’t really bothered Mike all that much. It hasn’t fazed me, either. It did give me a bit of a start the first time I saw Mike run his fingers through his hair and come away with a fistful of strands, and there were a few double takes while Liz was buzzing his head. It’s odd to see your partner suddenly acquire a look you’ve never seen before, and the vanishing hair is a very sudden, very tangible reminder of the cancer. But it’s also a change we knew was coming.

Bidding farewell to Mike’s hair was a moment we were mostly prepared for, and in the last couple of weeks the moments that have really thrown me are the ones I haven’t been expecting.

When Mike was diagnosed we received scores of lovely emails. Some of those letters were from friends who had themselves walked this path. Several of them told us that we’d settle into a new normal – a normal that included cancer. That is turning out to be true. It doesn’t seem normal, exactly, to hear Mike remind us all over lunch that he needs to do bloodwork on Friday, but it is all starting to feel much more routine.

But then there are these moments – these tiny awful moments that catch me unawares and remind me that things are far from normal.

Like walking past Mike on a Monday morning as we’re getting ready to leave for treatment, and seeing him spreading lidocaine cream up the insides of his arms in preparation for the cannulas.

And being down on the floor with Mike and Dominic, tickling and shrieking and laughing, and then suddenly catching sight of a row of small bruises tracing an red, angry vein all the way up to Mike’s elbow.

And going to write something on the family calendar by the phone and seeing “Mike chemo 8:30-1:30” written on every day next week.

And seeing our oncologist lean back in his chair and sigh after we explained our reasoning behind not taking Mike to the emergency room the previous week when his fever breached the recommended maximum.

“You survived,” he said dryly. “That’s the important thing.”

In these sorts of moments it’s glaringly obvious that things are not normal. I can flash a genuine smile while Mike’s hair is falling onto the bathroom floor, but these moments that sneak up on me? They are the things that threaten to really derail me. They can tilt my mood towards grim before I even have the chance to take a deep, steadying breath. They can trigger an internal avalanche of fear, annoyance, regret, and resentment. These tiny awful moments only last an instant, but they can poison me for hours.

I’ve been in a dark, hard place for most of the last two days. The pain in my jaw tells me I’ve been clenching my teeth again. I’ve ripped all of my fingernails short. I’m sighing a lot, perhaps because I feel like I’m wearing an invisible corset and just breathing is taking extra effort. I feel as if I’ve been short and ugly with those closest to me who are working very hard to help us. Yesterday, my parents hesitantly offered to take Alex in their room again for the first part of the night because, they said delicately, “you seem quite tired.”

In response I heaved a tortured sigh at the terrible burden of being expected to make a decision and said a surly, “fine”.

I have not been able to muster up much energy and life for anyone except our children. Not even Mike.

I can’t pinpoint everything that fed into this tailspin, but it started right around the time I drove into Ballina several days ago to pick up some antibiotics. Mike had woken up that morning to find a nasty infection suddenly raging in the foot he slashed open on the screen door two and a half weeks ago. We had an antibiotics script ready in case this very thing happened, so I drove in to fill it. When I passed the form over the counter and said it was for my husband, the pharmacist looked at “Oncology North Coast” stamped on the page and paused.

When she handed me the drugs she smiled nicely. Then she asked me, “Is your husband going to be OK?”

“Probably,” I said, startled into remembering that I didn’t know for sure. “Most likely.”

Tiny. Awful. Moment.

I’m not blaming two days of darkness on one tiny awful moment, but I’d guess that it was the trigger. So lately, when I haven’t been thinking about how I’d love to claw my way out of my own skin, I’ve been pondering triggers and moments.

In her gorgeous book Tiny Beautiful Things, Cheryl Strayed says this: “The most terrible and beautiful and interesting things happen in life. For some of you, those things have already happened. Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.”

It is clear that no matter how well you “armor-up” against life – how well you calibrate your expectations – tiny awful moments are going to happen during these sorts of hard seasons. So what would it look like to make these moments mine? And can I learn to greet them more gracefully, in ways that soften their punch? Can I learn to pick myself up faster after they leave me on the floor.

I clearly have some work to do in terms of answering those last two questions, but I’ll leave them aside for now. No specific “strategy” I use to foster a graceful resilience is going to help me 100% of the time anyway, not even chocolate ice cream (although I reckon it’s always worth giving that a try). Instead let’s talk about the bigger picture – how I aspire to make these tiny awful moments mine.

Here it is: I want to look these moments square on and let them be awful. Then I want to remember that they are tiny, look away, and let them go.

I find both parts of that simple formula difficult at times. It hurts to stare down these moments. It can be tempting to turn away too quickly – to busy myself packing a diaper bag, bathing a child, or focusing on something (anything) else. On the flip side, however, I sometimes don’t turn away quickly enough. I can linger with these moments long past what’s helpful, teasing out their grim implications with masochistic determination.

The pitfalls in both of these extremes are fairly obvious. If I choose numbness and shut down all of my instinctive reactions to the tiny awful moments, I risk flattening out my emotional depth perception – my ability to really feel those tiny beautiful moments on the other end of the spectrum. And if I make a habit out of stringing my tiny awful moments together and poring over them like beads on some dark Rosary, I court depression and anxiety. I steal space in my soul that rightfully belongs to peace and joy, and I turn it over to fear and sorrow. 

It’s Monday here again. I’m back beside Mike in the oncology unit. My weekend darkness has lifted, for now. I can breathe without having to try. As we left this morning, I was easily able to speak my thanks to our parents for, once again, looking after our children so that I could accompany Mike to the treatment center. And when the unit manager confirmed that the nasty infection in Mike’s foot is another visit from his old friend, staphococcus aureus, I was able to take a breath and stay centered. While they hooked him up to another dose of IV antibiotics as an hors d’oeuvres to today’s chemo drugs, I was able to remind myself…

These tiny awful moments belong to you. Let them be awful. Name them tiny. Make them yours. In time, you may even find that they nurture you.

And someday, somehow, they might even help you nurture others.

 Which to you find easier? Looking at those tiny awful moments full on, or letting them go and stepping forward into the next moment?