Alone, in the middle of the night, cancer victims I have known wrote long emails, sent to everyone they hoped might care.  I recall cc’s I got from two of them, one many years ago (she has survived, I saw her dancing at a wedding not long ago) and one, more recently, who was a wasted shell at my father’s funeral — held up on her son’s arm, who died not long afterwards.

The emails were excruciatingly detailed descriptions of cancer treatment, hopes, drug interactions, side effects, verbatim reports of talks with oncologists, nurses, spiritual advisers, descriptions of articles from medical journals.  One might call these email journals obsessively detailed.  The writers did not seem to pause for a breath, in their desire to tell the entire story, in every detail, how the drug trial, a long-shot, was nonetheless a hopeful thing, citing the literature, comparing side effects, describing how the previous chemo had made them feel, reciting many cancer terms of art with facile familiarity. They had been educated in a deadly grad school and they wrote long, scholarly emails.

These arrived in the night in one continuous paragraph, many screens long, or so my memory makes them appear.  I recall responding early on, and wishing them well and thereafter being at a loss, though they each thanked me profusely for writing a couple of sentences to them.  

One lived far away, the other I saw frequently as she grew thinner, lost her hair, grew it back, became drawn and skeletal, her beautiful smile more and more fleeting until it was just a memory.  Both wrote in the same way, writing to think out loud, writing to call out to other souls to answer them, writing not to feel so alone, awake and rattling the keys as they clung to their precariously teetering lives in otherwise silent houses.

I bring these up because I had an eerie feeling earlier today, thinking about some obsessively detailed emails I’d sent lately, in real time, about very specific aggravations I was going through.   The frustrations of buying mandated health insurance on the New York marketplace, by tomorrow’s deadline, for example, and having to pay $1,750 out of pocket, in addition to premium payments, before any insurance benefits kick in.  Or being dicked around by a corporation that helps nonprofits, and others, raise money on-line and does not make full payment more than a month after the campaign ends, its Customer Happiness bots cheerfully cranking out generic emails with update links that cannot be opened.  I realize the level of aggravated detail in my screeches of pain was probably similar to the emails from these two cancer patients.  Some suffer silently, others at great, sometimes unbearably detailed, length.  

I also had the troubling thought that diagnosed with cancer myself, I would probably find myself writing similar journals.  The odds are pretty strong both ways.  All four of my grandparents and both of my parents died of cancer, along with a young first cousin and a second cousin once removed, also quite young.  I’ve had a few small skin cancers already myself, and a few polyps snipped.  And I write by day and in the silence of night, sometimes in great detail.

I will now be as brief as I can as I explain to myself why I was so worked up by today.

On Monday a week ago I called my almost 93 year-old friend Florence, a great artist and a great soul.  She sounded befuddled on the phone, as she sometimes did.  I told her I’d call back.  When I spoke to her later she was completely clear and glad I’d be visiting her the following day.  I did.  The visit was wonderful and she looked great.  Three nights later she died.

I walked around the day after she died, last Sunday, feeling mostly grateful.  It was only when I told Sekhnet that Florence was gone that I found myself getting tearful.  Sekhnet is adept that way.

The following day my very promising young animation assistant was put into a terrifying position as the young man I am paying over-generously to arrive early and run the workshop showed up late and unprepared.  When I arrived the kids were one step from cannibalism, a bullied girl ran from the room.  This new group, and this promising and diligent assistant, may now be lost, the kids horses out of the barn and too late to lock the barn door. The young woman, seeing the carnage, may have been scared skittish.  I’d placed a lot of hopes on this new workshop and my new assistant.

Had dinner afterwards with Sekhnet, got choked up talking about a variety of things.  The next day and night I prepared a forced and muddled demo for the Wednesday workshop.  One girl correctly called the soundtrack creepy and I watched helplessly as my plans were cut to ribbons with little safety scissors.  I saw my dreams of this animation workshop flourishing and expanding littered across a classroom floor with the shredded materials that had been wasted.

Afterwards, after a long walk with Sekhnet, carrying heavy bags in the rain and expressing my hopelessness, she hit on an idea to help me.  Finding the 800 number for the company giving me the cold shoulder about the $450 they owed me from the fundraiser she urged me to call and straighten it out.   It was a sincere attempt to be helpful that resulted in me, on the fourth or fifth call, leaving a snarling message referring to the California attorney general’s office as Sekhnet called out the name of my nonprofit several times in the background as I tried to talk.  Wiping the foam off my lips I eventually accepted the tranquilizer she offered and found myself falling asleep twisted into a grotesque position memorialized by Sekhnet’s Blackberry.

A visit the following evening to an old woman dying slowly of Parkinsons, who seems to have lost the ability to communicate, didn’t feel like it brought anyone much joy.

Hours on hold trying to buy health insurance today, and so on.  I can add these things up and say “rough fucking week, man,” but I could not add them up in real time or distance myself in any single instance from the totality of them.  

Neither could I really get anyone to understand how unbearably painful any of it was to me, except for the sudden death of my oldest living friend.  Everyone can probably understand how much that one would hurt.