It may seem inconceivable now, but I used to be the Life of the Party. The part of my brain that now works overtime coming up with metaphors to explain what life with cancer is like used to stay busy telling clever jokes and deeply discussing music and literature. The body that is now boyish and frail was once voluptuous and strong, and men turned their heads when I walked into a room. There was a time when the Big Thing in my life was telling my then-boyfriend I didn't want to marry him.
But that has all changed, and now it seems that cancer has gone back into the past and retroactively infected my life from birth until now. But it hasn't, exactly. To a very few individuals on this earth, I am still the life of the party. One of these such people is my grandmother. I was diagnosed just as Alzheimer's was taking hold of her mind.
My aunt, her caretaker, called me to tell me my grandmother had remembered something, a fairly momentous occasion. "When I was the lunch lady at Rae's school, she loved the pizza," she said. I laughed in the way one laughs when something is more bizarre than funny. I didn't remember. I couldn't look through the window to the past without my current image superimposed.
The girl in the lunch line has been erased and the girl with cancer substituted where she used to be. She was me, but I am not her anymore. The girl in the lunch line's life was uncomplicated, and her grandmother served sloppy joes. I can't remember anything before I existed.
That girl who just liked pizza has cancer now. She always has and she always will. The young girl is dead to me. But somewhere in the lost tomes of a forgetful mind, her memory lives on.
I know EXACTLY how you feel. I was diagnosed with stage 2b cervical cancer earlier this year. I can't remember anything before March 4th, 2005. When I do, it's like a dream or like it happened to someone else.
Posted by: Aeryn | October 11, 2005 at 04:20 AM