To the end, in the Wasteland

I have been thinking about "The Wasteland" by T.S. Eliott here at the end of my cancer treatment. That sprawling, fatuous, fabulist, tortured masterpiece...something that has never entirely left my mind upon first acquaintance with it. It wedged respect for religion into Symbolist tropes, slammed Modernist poetry with a weight of meaning it was not supposed to acknowledge, buttressed free verse with metrics and metrics with free verse, and above all created the most Eurocentric work of art I can think of, "Roman de la Rose" not excepted.

I first read TW (as we'll call it hence) in high school, but it was my freshmen year at the University of Dallas where it became a part of my weltanschaung--all freshmen were required, at UD, to take Literary Tradition, and the term paper for all Literary Tradition students in Semester 2 were to be topiced upon TW. I ended up writing three term papers--one for myself, and two for hopeless friends whose love of poetry was nil and whose tolerance for peacocking one's classical education even less. To those curious, I made $20 and scored some incredible weed, thank you very much to my poetry-hating pals (and they got A's--I got an A+).

My journey with cancer has reminded me of TW at various times, in various ways. It has allowed me to see with some clarity how inhumanely I've been treated in public places--dismissively because I look odd, with no patience because I am not clear. London, Paris, Vienna--Unreal. Then too, how well--with a furtive smile, or a word of encouragement, like the day the woman next to me on the bus said: I hope you have a good day, as I exited at Mt Zion Hospital.

T.S. thought that April was the cruelest month--all of us have other choices. For me, this year, it was February, when all the weight of diagnosis came down upon me, the roof of my life exposed with rotten support beams. May because I thought treatment would not be over. June because it is, and I've lived a thousand years, and it's only been 4 months.

I've had to face my own shortcomings and decide to overcome them or not--and while, for the most part, I overcame, I've had my moments. Times when I've yelled at Scott for the dumbest thing (or rather, made sounds that sound like yelling), times when I've caught a 5 year old staring at me on the bus and flipped them off. Times when I've felt despair creep up my leg and I made not so much as a flick to brush it off, but welcomed it as valid. Let it rest and feed tick like off my life force for an afternoon to no net positive effect.

I have grown tired of the machines, the drugs, the warnings, the doctors, the nurses, the dos, the don'ts. And they have done nothing but try to help, but the failings of the system are evident quickly to those of use sucked up inside of it. The first, last and least accurate assumption of said system is that I'm nothing but my cancer, thus my entire life is theirs to schedule and inconvenience at will. I needed to fight against that assumption better, and should there be more that comes later, I'm ready to do it. No, I won't come back here after chemo to finish this treatment--chemo is an asskicker. Enough for one day. Call me tomorrow.

Despite a couple of small threats to my existence, the death that has been dancing in my mind has not been mine, but that of other people. My mother's death. My sister's recent death that has not brought me to any tears yet--why? Why can I not disconnect loss from effect and see one as separate from the other? I don't have the answer to that, except to say that study of the entirety of any situation spares one the fulsomeness of the emotion of any one part of it. The suffering my sister went through--so plain to me, and so plainly on view--keeps overriding the sure knowledge that I now have no sister. I cannot be so selfish as to want her here suffering just to spare me that grief.

Likewise, my mother--for whom I had the greatest affection that was loosened in her later years by behavior I now know to have been twisted by cancer--her brain was slowly invaded, and her faculties lessened by it. Her choices became, in the last five years of her life, obtuse to me; her insistence upon the fanatical inclusion of her friend whom I could barely tolerate, a brusque farm woman whose instant familiarity with me was grating and way too personal. I grew up with those people who treated me like their personal punching bag and property because we lived in the same small farm town--as if my life were an ownable sheet of vices that could be criticized at will. I loathed that woman, and her presence with my mother at every possible second of her life in the last few years drove a wedge between us that I regret. That death, that's the one that dances hard.

My father, too--how I'm glad that neither of my parents were here to witness this...I was so relieved when he died. He had sat upon the chest of my life for years, an unsmiling counterpoint to the selfish, irresponsible way I lived--those negatives coming about because I did not like fixing cars with him, being in the same room with him, and did not become a lawyer as it clear I should, to make sufficient money to support my parents in their old age...because why else would parents have gay kids? It's not like we're going to have families of our own to take care of...

In TW, both pre- and post-apocalypse are simultaneous events. In that way, cancer is very like it. I am experiencing, at the end of treatment, the worst side effects I've yet had, and they are projected to continue while I'm still "hot" from treatment, for the next two weeks. After that, they say, healing begins.

Where this mysterious healing goes is uncertain. Whether, after scanning and testing, this will have been judged a success is not known; what to be done if not, unknown, but not unknowable. Different chemos, different radiation patterns...if not intensities, given that I've been doused to the upper extent of rads that one is known to be able to tolerate. I try to force myself to think of it, but Madame Sosotris was correct when she noted that one must be careful these days with prognostication.

I became a better person reading TW, and pondering it, all these years--and finding new meaning in it, and laughing at parts of it I took seriously, and marveling at parts I didn't respect enough before. In another lifetime of work, perhaps four more months, I hope that I will have truly done the same with this experience. That I will have grown to be more compassionate, that I will know when I'm staring at the one person on the bus who least needs it, that I will have returned to some functions more respectful of them and more grateful to have them in my life. Those are the fragments I have shored against my ruin.