Strands

Today the hair comes off. It has been falling out, gently at first and then in handfuls, but as long as it looked semi-normal, I wanted to feel normal for just one more day. Today it looks sickly, and leaves a trail of strands across the floor, and clings, glistening, to my sweater.  I am wearing a cap, a gangsta cap according to Elai, to keep the floor clean.  I texted Dale this morning: it’s time to bring the buzzer and pull the beautiful chemo scarf from the drawer.

My friend Cailey wrote a poem for her blog that has left an image etched behind my eyes. Part of it says: “My whole body carts untold stories like birds afraid to migrate…I am afraid if I do not walk slowly enough they will unleash--pull the blood from my veins up through strands of the hair on my head…” Somehow it has seemed to me that as the stands of hair fall from my head, they pull out my thoughts and memories with them.  Today the process brought pain.

But I cannot stop writing.  I wake up at four in the morning with words burning through the roots of my hair, and I turn the lamp on, put a pillow, a cutting board (Robert’s invention) and the laptop on my lap, and I write. Somehow the cancer has freed something in me. It’s like I’m in slow mo, so that things slow down, and I can see them more clearly. And I am freed to do other things I don’t normally do. I talk to the ball-capped woman across from me in the chemo suite waiting room: “What treatment are you in for? See, my hair is going, too.” I talk to the Cancer Society volunteer in her bright bumble-bee vest, offering drinks and coffee to all of us in armchairs with chemicals flushing our veins.  And she remembers our care-givers, too, so Robert gets coffee.  The woman’s name is Bradely, an unusual name. She, too, is an English teacher, and she spent time in Kuwait teaching in a Canadian school there. It was tough, she said. The kids were spoiled, and the parents didn’t know to discipline them, and they were mostly boys because the girls were not as worth teaching. 

Made me miss my kids at Oaxaca Christian School.  So when today I opened a big package with cards from them, saying things like: “They say that you don’t know what you have until it’s gone. It’s so true! I have learned that you are simply the best and that no one can ever replace you, like no one—ever!” and “Yo, yo, yo, what’s good? Hope everything is going dope for you!” (Dope? Anyone want to translate?), it brought life back into my day. If it takes just falling strands of hair to move me to this place, then I accept.