Taking Advil on Dover Beach

Radiation is not so bad, just grueling. The room is too cold for the patient, who must lie still while others move around. The arm brace stretches my shoulder a bit, so that I have to follow the therapy with Advil. And you have to sit around waiting, waiting. Usually I forget to bring the newspaper (or I remember to bring it but leave it in the car), so I end up having to read some inspirational cancer rag: Mandy Patinkin says cancer is the best thing that ever happened to him. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. The grief made me an idiot.

So, no, cancer is not an occasion for joy. I want to be stuck in a time-warp before I was ever diagnosed.

Years ago, my husband talked me into reading some of his favorite poems. This has ruined me. Now, a bunch of Great Writers have preempted all my thoughts on my own experiences. Whenever I try to formulate what an atheist, particularly this atheist, might see as the upside to a recent diagnosis of breast cancer (low grade!), I find myself giving up. Because Matthew Arnold, writing in 1860, has already said it all:

Ah, Love, let us be true to one another! for the world which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams
So various, so beautiful, so new
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

My daughter finds something depressing in those words, but I find such a solid measure of joy in that first line, it sustains me for the rest of the poem: "Ah, Love, let us be true to one another!" That's all there is. The universe is just one damned thing after another. If you are dealt a terrible hand, the deuce of clubs and the four of spades and some trash to go with it, it means nothing. NOTHING. But we can still be true to each other (exclamation point). The message really isn't so different from that you can hear in the more mystical practices within many religions, particularly, Christianity. In other words, God is, well, God. Try not to take it personally.

And when you have no luck at all, when you find out about the cancer inside or the loss of a loved one, it doesn't mean that those fortunate others, the ones who look on you and count their lucky stars, are more beloved by the universe. And, really, it could have been worse. Think of all the young people who died in crashes and wars while still not out of their twenties. I could have died screaming like my great grandmother, because evolution cursed her with a 10 pound fetus when her hips were only so big. Or like my great great grandfather who died in his youth, fishing off Nantucket, trying to feed his family. Cancer at 53? The universe does not even blink. But I am still here to ponder the one, the only commandment: "Ah, love, let us be true to one another!"

And at least the world offers a little more "help for pain" than when Matthew Arnold was alive. Now where is that Advil?