The Carelessness

There was a cough in April that went on a few days longer than a cough should, and I did what I do now, which is a kind of arithmetic. How many days it has been, whether it's dry, whether the lymph nodes in my neck are sore, whether it's sitting in my throat, which is where they found it. Whether to say something out loud or wait until Thursday, when it will either be gone or it will be a thing.

It was nothing. It's almost always nothing.

I don't miss my health, exactly. I am well, and life goes on much as it did before, except that there is a second schedule underneath the ordinary one now. Bloodwork, treatments, scans every few months, some things settled and some still being watched. I have gotten used to the watching and, strangely enough, found a rhythm in it.

What I miss is the carelessness.

I miss the woman who could feel something in her body and not do the math, who heard a friend describe a symptom and offered sympathy without running a private inventory, who understood in a general and unbothered way that people get sick, and filed it as information about other people.

That's the part nobody warns you about, perhaps because it sounds ungrateful once you say it out loud. I am one of the lucky ones and I know it, and I still find myself circling back to her, the version of me who got to be vague about mortality, who made plans without a calculation running underneath them. She was lovely.

A diagnosis puts a line through a life. There is a before and an after, a pre and a post, and you don't get to cross back. What I didn't expect was how familiar that line felt.

I was twelve, taking a math test, when the sirens went, and then there were fighter jets and an explosion two blocks away and the building shaking, and all of us running at once. I got crushed under larger bodies in the doorway and came out with my face covered in blood. What I lost that morning was not safety, because safety had been theoretical in Iran for a while by then. What I lost was the assumption that a Tuesday stays a Tuesday. I made a vow, the way children do and in language much bigger than they are, that I would quickly regain control over my destiny.

I have been keeping that vow for thirty-five years, and it has cost me more sleep than it has ever returned. Then cancer arrived and was not particularly impressed by any of it.

The disorientation rhymes. There is a girl in a doorway with blood on her face and a woman counting the days of a cough.

There is another side to it, which I don't know how to say without it sounding like a greeting card. The colors really are brighter now. Voices are louder, and emotions run higher. I can sit with someone for twenty minutes and know which of us has stopped listening. Conversations that used to be pleasant enough are now either the best hour of my week or close to unbearable, with not much left in between.

The trivial has become easy to spot too, from across the room, inside the first thirty seconds. Once you see it, you can't unsee it, and you still have to sit through it. My relationship with discomfort changed too. I've always chased it a little, the way people do who like to think of themselves as brave, but these days I stay in it longer than I used to, past the point where I would once have left, because that's usually when something actually starts to happen.

It changed my work too. I feel more of what people are carrying, faster and closer in, and it turns out that's most of what makes me good at this now. Since the diagnosis I've learned how to sit with someone whose situation may not improve, without trying to fix it, without performing hope, and how to be a partner in helping them find what they actually want. I would not have chosen it, and I would not undo it either.

If you asked whether I want my old life back, I would want to say yes, and I am not sure that I would. Something had to interrupt me before I stopped waiting to feel ready.

Meanwhile my daughters are becoming themselves. Leona is almost sixteen and Sasha is thirteen, the age I was when I started over in a new country, another before and after of sorts. School starts in August, and I notice that I am counting those weeks too, with the same instrument I use on the cough. I'm nostalgic for something that hasn't ended yet. I want them around longer, and I am already holding on.

The lens doesn't come off, and you don't get to choose which things it turns on.

Knowing your time is finite leaves you with two instructions that refuse to reconcile. Don't waste it and don't miss it. One has me at my desk before the house is fully awake, already deep in the thing I believe I am here to do, aware of how much of it is left, and the other has me at the kitchen table with my family, in the middle of a conversation about nothing in particular, with no reason to get up, wanting time to freeze. They pull in opposite directions and they are both correct, and I have stopped waiting for one of them to win.

The cough clears, and April turns into May. I notice more than I used to, and I wouldn't give it back.

I still miss the woman who didn't do the math.

This piece first appeared on my Substack, Margin Notes by Kati. If you're sitting with a diagnosis of your own, or someone else's, more on Cancer Journey Coaching is here.