Chapter 10

Coexisting with cancer

My name is Jimmy and this is a poem about cancer:

S**t.

The last three months have been. . . Devastating, chaos, unreal. They knocked me on my a*s. Leukemia demands more attention than anything I have ever faced in my life. I started by dedicating all my spare time to research. I wanted to know as much as possible without making Olivia think about it more than she had to. I began driving her to her appointments and taking full advantage of any time alone I had with her oncologist, Doctor Williams. He is a grave, wiry man with short grey hair who answered my questions unflinchingly. 

Olivia has acute lymphoblastic leukemia. It is in remission. The word remission has a deceptively nonthreatening sound. Relapse is a very real fear and treatment will continue indefinitely until her body is free of cancerous cells. 

I have been working hard to maintain as much normalcy as possible, like the websites suggest. Until she requests my assistance, falls asleep or throws up, I let Olivia take care of herself, but when she needs me I am there to make nutritious, non-nausea inducing foods, do laundry, cary her to bed and wash dishes. 

Some days she is happier than others, and she doesn’t like to talk about how much pain she’s in, but she never pretends and I appreciate that. Her hair gets thinner everyday, and what’s left is like a wispy blond ghost. Olivia has told me on more than one occasion that she is lucky it’s still there, but I know she is still mourning the missing strands. 

On the weekends I go to work at the garage. It’s nice to have a job I actually enjoy, but there are days when I just want to stay home with Olivia. 

Last month I sent Katie’s mother a sympathy card. 

A week later I found Olivia’s guitar in the back of her closet and she offered to play it for me. Now she is teaching me, and when my fingers find the right notes she sings along and it’s magic, even though neither one of us is a rockstar. 

During the last week of July we got restless and walked back into the woods where the hot summer sun was blocked by the treetops high over our heads. My feet led us to the edge of my empty grave and that beautiful girl took my hand and pulled me down into it, and we rolled around in the dirt like it was our last day on earth. And I told her I loved her and she said it back, and her voice made it sound like a prayer, a prayer of thanksgiving, not of forgiveness, and it was beautiful and my heart said ‘amen’.

Earlier that same month Olivia cut my hair and told me I looked “dapper” when she was finished. 

Three weeks ago, Olivia looked up, as if struck by a sudden thought. 

“Are you still paying rent on the house next door?”

“Uh, y,yes.” I answered, unsure. Probably the only reason I could afford to live in that house in the first place was because I had the world’s worst landlord. Fortunately for me, he was a serious drug addict, who was usually too stoned to notice if you had been paying rent or not-- let alone if it was late or a little short. 

After that, I moved out, officially. I got ahold of my junky landlord, scraped together the money I owed him and terminated our agreement. Olivia and I went next door and cleaned out all my s**t. It was unsettling to go back to that house after I had been away so long, like visiting an abandoned prison. It was exactly how I had left it, dingy sheets crumpled at the foot of my empty bed, a few mostly empty food containers in the fridge and dirty laundry on the floor. I hated seeing Olivia there, she’s so perfect, I hate knowing that she exists in the same world that I do. It felt like I was showing her a piece of my soul. I guess Olivia is one person I don’t have the luxury of hiding anything from, though.  

A week ago I found my brother’s gun, tucked in the very back of the freezer, behind bags of frozen peas and TV dinners. It was covered in a thin layer of frost and as I pulled it out I smiled to myself. That night I put it in a box and left it on my brother’s back porch. Some days I still feel pathetic and useless, like everything I do is a waste, because it will never be enough. That’s the thing that sucks about cancer, when you don’t have it: I will always feel like there was something more I could have done, even though there might not have been. I never have much time to dwell on any of it, though; between fighting cancer and trying to forget about fighting cancer, our days are filled.

It might be because she saved my life, but I think Olivia is incredible. She is the most incredible person that I have ever met. She is like a miracle, that one shining wafer of light in a world of complete darkness. It’s like I said, though, beautiful things never last. Only Olivia isn’t wilting or fading or moving to California, she’s being slowly ripped to pieces. And the worst of it isn’t the hair loss or the fatigue or the nausea, it is watching the hope slowly drain out of her every day. I can cary her to bed, I can make her food, but I cannot replace her lost hope. And everyday she gets weaker and sadder, and it hurts me to recognize the look on her face, to know that deep down Olivia has accepted the circumstances of her death, that acceptance lives inside her and she feels its presence night and day, cold and unrelenting.

Yesterday Olivia picked up the poetry book off her dresser while she was pacing and brushing her teeth in her underwear. She looked at it for a moment then dropped it into the trash before walking back to the bathroom to spit. Heartbroken, I picked it up and followed her.

“Why are you throwing this away?”

She looked at me in the bathroom mirror, “Oh it isn’t mine. Some guy left it at my place and I found it in a box when I was unpacking.” She explained. She turned her attention back to rinsing her toothbrush, “I hate poetry, it never makes any sense.” She says, with more passion behind her voice than the topic warrants. “Death isn’t a beautiful mystery, it’s a cold, ugly fact.” She mutters, shutting off the water and walking away.

Author's Note

this chapter has so many notes scribbled on it in my prepwork, i almost hesitate to put it up, but it fills in some blanks in between the more action packed stuff