Yeah — and Another Thing!

I have non-Hodgkins, peripheral, T-cell lymphoma. If diseases had a Hit Parade, this one would be pushing the low thirties. It’s subtle. It let’s you walk around for a while and the pain can be just like a mild flu.

I don’t believe yet in my own death; I still feel like a 16-year-old who knows you can hurtle down a hill and miss the tree just by not looking at it. But the question that seems so obvious for anyone who is introduced to his or her own death — anyone, that is, who is lucky enough to have time to contemplate it — demands some kind of response. “Why me?” is a tough one.

My approach is fiction. I’ve organized six short pieces into a hierarchy: mystical, ritual, judgmental, random, voluntary, and, well I’m not sure what the last one is — possibly because it’s the truest. Six is an attractive number because Charles Dodgson seemed to like it.

My doctor, who appears in the fourth piece, has told me a lot about the disease of course, but his eyebrows told me more. He has a Katzenjammer-Kids face with glasses that magnify his blue eyes and a hairline like the edge of a spruce forest. What they said was “Never seen this work.”

And that’s when you can begin to think about ways that death finds you. I don’t mean whether you’re dressed to go out when the cab shows up, I mean how the cab figured out it was you, at that particular time on that particular street even though you’re not sure you made the call. If you’re looking for an account of having lymphoma I can’t help you. But if you read fiction and have a half-hour this might help you think about the impossibility of your own death.