This afternoon I dozed in bed, and when I woke it seemed to me that my bed and the night table and the shining brass lamps and the pale green armchair in the corner of the room had been replaced with exact replicas. The room I know so well had somehow become a fake room. I wasn’t myself and I wasn’t at home. My fear and pain have infected everything. I want to go home. Please, lift this enchantment and let me go home.
In four weeks they will begin the poisoning, a poisoning that may not do me much good. But I hope, no, I pray for the magic of remission.
I wait now. Penelope, the patient, waits patiently. The robotic Dr. P. is gone and now I wait to see the somewhat kinder doctor, Dr. R., and I wait to see Dr. F. to talk to him about Dr. R. and to tell him about my fear and my trembling. I wait in dread for Dr. R. to call to tell me about tumor blood markers, CA-125. I wait for her to discover what shrinks or grows in the abdominal disaster area, my very own corporeal ground zero, debulked, but not divested of horrors. I have been attacked from within, and I live in a state of continual envy of people with cells that haven’t multiplied into killer legions. I watch them stroll down Madison Avenue or disappear into the Eighty-Sixth Street subway near Dr. R.’s office. I see them amble hand in hand along the waterfront, go in to have a drink at Sunny’s. I marvel at their casual wellness, their hale, tumor-free bodies, and their complete indifference to the fact that they are alive.
Over and over, I remember giving birth to Maisie and then to Ethan. It must be the memory of the good body, the fertile body before it began to eat itself alive. The now-vanished ovaries that gnawed me unto death — a crueler punishment for H.B. could not have been devised. Have you been ambivalent about your sex, Harry? You bet you have. Well, lady, here is your fitting chastisement, the ironical twist on a life lived partly behind male masks.
Memories of birth pains. I squat for Ethan. A speedy labor. Push. Push down. The head stuck and then push, push, and the long, wet body with black hair slides out of me, still attached by a bloody purple cord. Alive.
Birth, like illness, and like death, is not willed. It simply happens. The “I” has nothing to do with it.
February 10, 2004
I am desperate to work, but it is so hard. I teeter on knees that shake. My extremities are electrified, and I panic about time. I am so tired. In Bruno’s worried face I see my own dread. Often, I cannot believe I will not live.
Why would anyone want to die?
Maskings is remote now, but I wish that my work had a home and that the pseudonyms might be understood as a complete project — unfinished business.
I am having all the work catalogued.
A. C. Robinson. Lester Bone.I
For Felix: The Book of Disquiet.
O prince of better days, I was once your princess, and we loved each other with another kind of love.II
February 26, 2004
There are mornings when I wake up and it takes an instant to remember. For a few hours sleep snuffs out the terrible real. I am sick, bald, disemboweled, and nauseated. I have a rash all over my body, an effect of the Taxol. Not unusual. The itching is so terrible I have taken to slapping myself. I have spasms of diarrhea and then constipation, and my mind is not working well, because chemotherapy makes you stupid.
I can’t remember the date. I’ve lost the day, too.
Panic. Then calm. Then panic again.
I dreamed this afternoon that the tumors had popped out through the skin of my belly above my pubic hair, which looked like bristling foliage. The tumors shook with life, and I eagerly began to pull at them, to tug them out of me, to save myself. They bloodied my hands. I was able to draw out one long, trembling snake. The triumphant joy I felt. Unspeakable joy. We who are leaving the world can still wish to stay.
I have more to do. There are undiscovered worlds inside me, but I will never see them.
It’s a Wednesday and the weather is cold and cloudy.
Every dying person is a cartoon version of the Cartesian dualist, a person made of two substances, res cogitans and res extensa. The thinking substance moves along on its own above the insurrectionist body formed of vile, gross matter, a traitor to the spirit, to that airy cogito that keeps on thinking and talking. Descartes was far more subtle about mind-and-body interactions than many crude commentators admit, but he was right that thoughts don’t seem to take up any room, not even in one’s head. What are they? No one knows. No one really knows what a thought is. It must involve the synapses and the chemicals, of course, but how do the words and pictures come into it? I am still here narrating my own ending. I, Harriet Burden, know I am going to die, and yet a piece of me refuses this truth. I rage against it. I would like to spit and scream and howl and punch the bedclothes, but these demonstrations would hurt this frail skeleton with its few putrid remaining organs far too much. I have laughed, too, laughed carefully so as not to wound same-said bag of bones and sorry scrap of flesh, but I have laughed nevertheless at my imminent death. I have told corpse jokes and carried on about plans for my own funeral.
March 5, 2004
I have come home to die, but dying is not so simple in this our twenty-first-century world. It takes a team. It takes “pain management.” It takes hospice at home. But I have been strict with them. This is my death, not yours, I said to the goddamned social worker who oozed compassion when we planned the final step, how to die “well.” An oxymoron, you idiot. I said NO to the grief counselors with their sympathetic faces peddling denial and anger and bargaining and depression and acceptance. I said NO to professional mourners of all kinds and their goddamned clichés. I will have NO simpering crap uttered within ten miles of my deathbed. I boomed these words. I mustered up a boom. I was magnificent.
The boom has left me. I am a leaky vessel — urine and feces and tears ooze from me without permission. I have diapers that must be changed. My bowels ruined by surgery are twisted again with tumors. My hair has grown back straight. The frizzy hair I detested and then learned to love is gone and in its place lank, gray straw has grown. I am truly a monster now, ashamed of its hideous body. I smell piss, shit, and some other unknown odor no one else admits to smelling, but it must be the stench of dying. I smell it as I write this, wafting up from the war zone below the sheets. I should be bathed in bleach. I am lying in my special bed that goes up and down at the press of a button, parked by the window so I can look onto the water and gaze at Manhattan across the way. I miss the world I am leaving, but I have not forgiven it. Its bitter taste remains, a hard crust in my mouth I can’t spit out.
Pearl is looking over my shoulder to see what I am writing. She is all efficiency, a sharp one. Born in Trinidad, lived in Sweden, now in NYC. Private nurse. Speak to me in Swedish, I say, and she does.
I would like to retrieve the mind I had — the one that leapt and did jigs and somersaults in the air. I used to want them to see it, to recognize my gifts. Now I would settle for just having it back.
April 2, 2004
I told Bruno today that I am the dying beast, and he is Beauty. He shook his head and his lips trembled. You are so beautiful, I said. You are robust and hearty and my own darling Beauty. Come to the beast, I said. And he laid his head on my chest and squashed my breasts, and the weight of his skull hurt me. Everything hurts me now. Nausea comes. The morphine makes me hazy. The pain rises. I want so much to write, to tell, but it is harder and harder.
April 13, 2004