Poetry:
McMullen, Richard E
Perhaps the hardest glitches for nature to cope with are those caused by any feel-good chemicals that may have been brought in to help out. The great James Thurber, for instance, was never...
...A book about health is perforce a book about sickness, and Richard E. McMullen Pills and Tablets Each time the man laid out the medicines, he saw it...
...For reasons dating back at least to the Garden of Eden, the greatest happiness imaginable wears off with sickening speed and suddenly isn't good enough for us...
...It's just that Anatole received his apocalypse a little earlier than most, and was spared the dark night that usually precedes it...
...With that thunderclap event, why aren't we all out dancing right now...
...And there's a certain excitement to be had just from living on the edge: you are more fully alive then you have ever been, and getting more out of each day...
...Every cheer comes with an asterisk, but so does every groan, as the will to live keeps pounding back...
...Once one's old self has moved back in, new stories will start up, and some of them will probably be sad ones...
...For most of us, there's no avoiding the fact that learning you've got cancer can be a gruesome experience, especially if your system is depressed at the time anyway, as mine was...
...During the whole time I was under this particular cloud, I would have sold my soul cheerfully (if I could have done anything cheerfully) just to hear from someone else who had passed this way and could tell me what was actually happening to me and what to expect next...
...There is no sadder specimen on heaven or earth than an old drunk around two in the morning after he's just hit the wall for the thousandth time, and it doesn't matter how good or bad his eyesight is or how many operations he's had...
...but partly also because he seems to have tried to drink his way out of trouble, and it simply can't be done: booze is like an exit door painted on the wall for which alcoholics and other optimists manage to fall every time...
...His dead hand, groping back toward life, forgot the hidden spin the hand puts on everything...
...I guess the revelation for me was to find that a good death doesn't defy imagining at all, once you've had cancer yourself for even a little while...
...This would be an extreme case: if you go down far enough you might conceivably stay up forever, which is something for depression cases to look forward to, if they can still look forward to anything in that condition...
...Civilian readers I talked to about Broyard's epiphany couldn't make head or tail of it, but it made perfect sense to me...
...So I've had to write it myself, scene for scene-all the things I would like to have read back then...
...Pills, tablets stood impossibly on edge...
...but even with your heart wedged deep in your boots, the speed of mental adjustment can be quite uncanny, and the number of people I've known who've lived and died anywhere from serenely to downright happily with cancer defies normal imagining, almost as Broyard's essay did [Intoxicated by My Illness, Clarkson Potter...
...A religious person might point out that we weren't put on earth to dance all day anyway, although some returners from hell come awfully close to it...
...A friend of mine who spent four years in the Pacific Theater of the Absurd in World War II, flinching from trees that might or might not contain Japanese soldiers and jumping out of his skin every time a twig snapped, told me that he could hardly look at his suburban lawn of an evening without wanting to kiss it...
...Which, as I said in Lear's, I've been living off ever since...
...Well, there are complications...
...Although I had never greeted my own bad news in that particular way, it was certainly in the realm of possibility...
...The great James Thurber, for instance, was never reconciled to his blindness, partly because it led him in the course of it through countless painful eye operations, each of which must have raised and dashed his hopes brutally...
...The usual pattern of remission and recurrence of this illness lends a stop-start quality to any elation you may feel over its high points...
...Which brings me to Illness No...
...2, addiction-depression...
...3. No two of these things are identical, and one finds that the cards have been shuffled again for cancer...
...D 12: 24 February 1995 Commonweal...
...in the matter of artificially induced depressions, there seems to be an almost exact equation between down and up, as if one could with a mighty effort turn the minus sign next to one's melancholy into a plus and watch one's spirits rise like mercury-just in time, in my case, to take on Illness No...
...My late friend Anatole Broyard reported being suffused with an unearthly euphoria when he first got wind of his cancer, along with a curious sense of superiority to average mortals, who never get to see their lives as clearly as he now saw his...
...Life can't get dull enough for me," he said...
...But among all the thousands of inspirational and pseudoscientific words I could find on the subject, not one came close either to describing what I was going through, or suggesting anything useful to do about it except go to meetings and talk, talk, talk, which is the water I swim in anyway...
...But for the run of mankind, the dancing does have to stop sometime, and you are left with nothing but an unbelievably good memory...
Vol. 122 • February 1995 • No. 4
