Flashback to August 2010 - A Letter to The Great Mystery

Poking around this morning in a folder filled with old "daily writes," I came across this letter that I wrote to the Great Mystery, a bit over a year ago, shortly before my descent into a year that was mostly comprised of Hell.

I think I'll share it (again) now that I have exited Hell for a while, I hope. Beware, it includes some cuss words that you might find offensive. Sorry, but I am not going to censor myself.

August 2010

Dear Great Mystery,

I want to thank you for letting the sun come out today, yesterday, and the day before yesterday. It has been an unusually cold summer, overall, and I know that the gray chill was depressing me, but I didn't realize how much until you gave us the gift of this outburst of sun. I'm still depressed and angry about all sorts of things right now, but less so . . .  and that is thanks to this glorious sunshine and warmth. I even ordered a freaking hammock, as you know.  It has been downright hot, some would say uncomfortably so, but I am not complaining. I will take all the heat I can get.

Thanks, too, for suggesting that memoir or personal essay title, Land of the Floor.

In addition to thanking you, I hope you won't mind if I also put out a request or two. You aren't a God per se, so I don't know if you grant requests, but if by some chance you do, here goes. I'm confused. Of course, I'm always confused on some level, but right now I'm especially confused. To be more specific, I'm confused about how to handle the rising tumor marker numbers.

 
So many possibilities are racing through my mind, ranging from "do absolutely nothing" to a whole string of notions, in no particular order. Here are but a few of them: go for a walk, homeopathic remedies, more Vit. C, the Gonzales protocol, Dr. Wong's herbs, buy one of those $1,000 one-way plane tickets that will let you keep going for as long as you want so long as you go in only one direction, ie. around the world, drive across town and take leaf and tree photos in a neighborhood you've never taken photos in before, go brush your teeth, go to Marseilles to see Will and Alexandra both (and take photos of leaves in Marseilles!) in September, take artemisinin or metformin or Phoenix tears hemp oil, travel far away and spend all your life savings on some kind of fancy hard-to-get vaccine, get a CT Scan on the off chance that something relatively "treatable" will show up, even though you suspect that nothing will show up because the mets are there but still too small... and thus you will have dosed yourself with cancer-causing radiation at as high a dose as if you'd been near Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped.

Or (I'm not done yet, as you can see, but wanted to create a new paragraph):  IPT, Inositol, low dose fractionated chemo, lymph massage, photonic light therapy, Budwig protocol, read a book and block out all thought of what to do, work on the fucking website and block out all thought of what to do,  get your hair cut, swab your cervix with progesterone and iodine (but how?), insist to Doc R. that he immediately call the inventors of the Greek chemosensitivity test and then report back to you with updated and meaningful findings (ha ha ha), etc.

As you can see, I'm all over the board. I'm also incredibly exhausted by trying to keep it all together.  I'm also irrationally angry at pretty much everything. I'm irritable, snappy, nasty, whiney. I stomp around, ignore Jack when he holds out his arms as if to hug me, and I think Fuck fuck fuck godFUCKingdamnit way too many times a minute.

I don't want to blog about any of this. I don't want to have or even imagine any of my friends feeling sorry for me or feeling critical of my decisions thus far. I don't want people speculating about my personal life. I don't want them solicitously hovering around me or, conversely, avoiding me like I'm a leper.  I want my privacy, but I don't want to feel all alone. Good thing I tend to like paradox.

But wait. I realize now as I read back over what I've just written that I have not actually made any requests of you.

Request: Please help me.

Not specific enough? I was afraid of that.

Okay.

Request: Please help me get my head on straight.

Still not good enough? Fuck you.

Okay.

Please help me get my groove back. Oops, I already said that, just in different words.

Fine. I'll try again:

Please help me prioritize. Please help me get centered in my HEART. Please help me make decisions that come from a deeper place than just THOUGHTS, although intelligent informed thoughts are good, too.

Also: Please help me earn more money to pay for all these out of pocket bills, and help me do it without stressing myself out so much that the stress negates everything else I'm doing to try and heal myself.

Please help me to believe and remember to believe that healing is not about not dying, it's about living as fully as possible, and as gracefully as possible, until you die. Please help me to be someone who handles this whole situation with grace and strength and good humor and calm, rather than with fear and anger and nastiness and self-pity.

Please help me have a better selection of clothes to wear while I go through all this. Please even go a little crazy and get me a free facelift or at least an eye job and some botox. Please get me over to Nordstrom's for the prosthesis fitting and ordering, or please maybe even make it possible to get the reconstruction that I thought I wouldn't ever consider.

Please please please please help me to start writing again and to finish either a novel or a memoir, and enjoy doing it, and make a great advance from it and then some good royalties.

Please help me go further with my photography and make some money at it, too.

Please let me live to be a really old woman with at least grandchildren, if not great-grandchildren. Please help me to not stop being a good mother because I'm so preoccupied and self-absorbed with  my fucking goddamn motherfucking breast cancer.

Please help me have a better and more exciting relationship with Jack. We need more down time. Also some really good pot for special occasions. I wouldn't overdo it; it makes me too sleepy.

Please don't let that offer for a free iPad turn out to have been a stupid scam for dumb people.

That's it for now. I have to get back to updating the goddamned fucking website.

I really really appreciate your listening, and would appreciate it (as you already know) if you would grant me one or more of these requests. Obviously I don't REALLY need ALL of them to be granted. Just the important ones, and you know better than I do what those are, that much I am sure of.

All the Best,
Jane

 

 

Comments

[linda]

I want to read your memoir.
And I want to read your September 2011 Letter to The Great Mystery

[Ms. K]

Love this. Love you.

[Harlan Lewps]

PJ you stop me in my tracks. Heart, center, less stress, all these things we all want, including royalties and an I-Pad. When I'm feeling whacked out I stare at the screen and drool but you write these amazing, incisive letters.