waiting

when i reflect on the process of going through cancer treatment, the ability to wait has been the skill most required of me. At the first, it was 24 - 48 hours sitting in in an ER chair waiting to be seen, watching people come and go, shifts changing, life happening before moving eyes and still body.

waiting has become a frame for me (in an attempt to retain my sanity). i think about the act of waiting, of waiting when i am uncertain about the longevity of my life. i ask myself how a person can wait when they are unsure of the time that they have left, when symptoms overlapping and compounding, as if the bottom of universe itself may fall out at any moment. i look into myself to ask how one remains calm during those long sick days, waiting out symptoms that may or may not subside.

in the past, i have struggled with fatigue and other ailments that have kept me in bed but never have i felt so totally empty. i have reached the absolute limit and gone beyond it. i have terraformed my life with this new understanding. in order to wait, I let go of nearly everything i thought was mine, realizing that it was borrowed.

i let go of the expectation that i can accomplish beyond even the bare minimum expected of me. i let go of the expectation of certainty, accepting how my health fluctuates from day to day, moment to moment. i may or may not be sleeping in my own bed if during an appointment, they find a complication in my test results.

i have had to let go of any future plans that aren’t happening today or tomorrow. i don’t have the security to know whether or not i will ever be returning to life as usual. i am spoken to of my chances in percentages and likelihoods and try to believe it with all the fervour of a prayer.

most of my life i have had some plan in mind, an expectation of where i will go and who i will be. the paradigm of planning itself has been thrown out of the window and i imagine myself an itinerant monk, curious of what might happen today, what acts of kindness will allow me to live. the solid ground is turned to sand and am i am tasked with becoming okay with that in order to survive.

it is an act of survival to become okay with uncertainty, to become comfortable with these periods of waiting. i have to be okay not knowing where money will be coming from because i can’t work in the way i did before. there is a sense of uncertainty about nearly everything in my life up to an including my life itself.

i come into contact with more dying people now than i ever have before, some of whom also once had positive prognoses and who are also doing everything within their power to let go and to be brave. you might think that someone who is dying would exist in some existential nightmare, but it seems very much as strange and at times banal as my own experience, that even when you are dying, you are still facing moments of startling boredom, waiting.

i don’t know what else to do but to move through the moments of my life as i always have. i don’t know if it’s brave or just what i am used to doing. i am used to chaos and disorder so cancer has measured up to my expectations in that way. i only know how to move forward, i realize, barely knowing how to comprehend something such as this, how to make sense of these broad movement of uncertainty moored on the grounds of utter and total boredom. it’s a strange mixture of things, the balance of which has not come easy. yet, it’s also difficult to stress, being so empty, knowing so little about what is going to happen.

the confusion, i think, is what shields me from the worst of it. i don’t know what to be most afraid of. i don‘t know what is going to happen tomorrow or next week, and certainly not next year. i am hopeful that i will make it through this, even without absolute knowledge. i think of the best outcome as a kind of talisman to all of the waiting, thinking maybe that what i am waiting for is my future, a future where i might get to live after all.

it makes it worth all this waiting to think that after all of this, i might get to live after all and am really starting to realize what an incredible gift that is.