Where Life Begins

"Life begins," Sartre once wrote, "on the other side of despair." 

I read that recently, and damn if it isn't true. It sure has been for me, and for my family. 

I remember the time before. Before the cancer, and the adoption, and the stress, and the fear. So much fear. Fear of death, fear of loss, fear of the unknown, fear of what people think, fear of... fear itself, as Winston Churchill once spoke of. Before the Despair, I think it's safe to say that my entire life was dominated by fear. I walked, talked, and breathed from that place.

Of course I didn't know it at the time. I remember talking with Emily about how we were just waiting for the other shoe to drop, about how life had been a little too easy so far. I still believe that some people are swimming upstream in life and other downstream, but even those headed with the current have to face it sometimes. I think I'm a downstream fish. Even going against the current turned out to be for my good, because, it's just like Sartre said so long ago, life began on the other side the struggle.

Of course Cancer was the struggle. Or maybe that's not entirely true. Maybe cancer just opened my eyes to the struggle that was really occurring in life, and not just my own, all around me all the time. The Buddhists says that the live is to suffer, and they don't mean it in a depressing sort of way. I still can't wrap my head completely around the concept, but as far I understand, they mean that simply floating along through life life a wisp of cottonwood tree dandruff on the surface of the stream is no life at all, because you don't feel alive in the same way as if you're directing your path. And if reality is defined more by how we see it than anything else, then suffering really is an integral part of this life. Do you understand? Sometimes my thoughts are still a bit muddled. Even though I'm now on a "maintenance dose" of chemo, it's still chemo, after all. 

Anyways, about the other side of despair. It's good here. I don't know what to say about it, really. You just notice things that you never would have before. The first, and most cheesy (but true!), example that comes to mind is flowers. I actually notice them now, and I actually stop and smell them. Building a fire to cook steaks outside when the heat index is 112 with my son, dripping sweat, is fun. There's a lot more room for people on this side.

I must say, I'm quite surprised to find that I like it here, without reference, ungrounded. I don't know who the hell I am anymore, and I don't much care. I don't think I want to try to rigidly define myself like I once did. I want to love people, I want to help people, and I want to climb things. It's simple, really. So why does it feel otherwise during the day-to-day? Perhaps because I spend so much of that time engaged in maintenance activities of life, like fixing the weed-eater head or doing the dishes. I need to get back to those basics. The bottom line is that there are things I should do and things I should not do, and I know what they are. It's not difficult to divine. I think I'll start behaving accordingly, so that I can spend more time loving and helping people and climbing mountains, all of which is so healing for me, now that I'm on the other side of Despair.

August

We’ve come to the end of another August, the month that just 2 years ago changed our lives forever. It was August 6th, 2019 when we learned Levi had stage IV cancer, and I immediately went into overdrive managing the household, preparing the kids for school, booking appointments, keeping track of meds, scheduling meals & childcare, planning trips to and from treatment in Houston, and a million other things.  

That same week we closed on our second flip house, which added another huge project to my already overflowing plate. Friends and family came out of the woodwork to help in every way imaginable, but the bulk of the responsibility and the mental load was still mine. Administrative tasks being my forte, I seemed to juggle the busyness with relative ease, checking things off my to do list almost as quickly as I wrote them down. I was proud of how I managed it all, especially while facing a tragedy that could have made our household crumble. 

I knew at the time that cancer is the type of trauma that leaves a lasting impact, but I (stupidly) believed I would come away unscathed. After all, I was doing so well! I was hitting every curveball thrown our way and knocking it out of the park. As I watched everyone else in my family fall apart emotionally at various times over the last couple of years, I took it upon myself to “manage” their breakdowns just as I had any other task. For someone who readily buries emotions, this was exhausting work but a job I felt I had to do in order to restore peace to our family and return to the normal we once knew. [News flash: you never return to the same “normal” after cancer.] 

Four months after Levi finished cancer treatment we adopted Owen, a 2.5-year-old boy with his own trauma experience. The timing wasn’t ideal, but we had prayed for this to happen, and the doors were being thrown open for us, making it clear he was supposed to be part of our family. An answered prayer! Who were we to question the timing? After all, we were used to living a high-stress lifestyle after the last year. It would be fine! 

We’re so glad we took the leap of faith it took to add Owen to our family, but the first year wasn’t easy. His own trauma showed up in the way of behavior issues, including being kicked out of mother’s day out (twice!), making our home life extremely stressful for everyone. Nora & Wyatt’s bond was disrupted by a new person wanting their attention, Wyatt was no longer the baby of the family and now he had to share his room, I worked to get Owen every psychological and behavioral evaluation possible and get him in counseling, therapy, anything that would help. 

[Side note: I’m glad to report that a year later Owen is happy, thriving, and doing incredibly well in school.] 

I worked overtime to “fix” everything trauma caused for everyone but me. After all, I was fine. I just needed to make everyone else fine, too, so we could just. move. on. I saw this quote earlier this summer and it resonated some with me; after all, it was only halfway through the year and I had already bought and flipped a third house, read 21 books and planned and executed three major vacations. Maybe I was overworking as a trauma response? Life had begun to settle; yet I continued to move at 100 miles per hour. It’s what felt comfortable, and I sought out tasks to complete even when nothing was pressing to get done. I brushed off the feeling that maybe this quote rang true of me, and instead kept marching on at my regular breakneck speed. 

It wasn’t until yesterday, appropriately in August (apparently the “anniversary effect” is a thing), that it hit me how out of control my productivity had gotten. We sold our flip house on August 9th, and within the following three weeks I built and installed bathroom shelves, built TWO loft beds FROM SCRATCH, refinished a vintage desk, and built a bookshelf from plans I found online. I did all this while managing the regular home tasks of childcare, school prep, grocery shopping, errands, appointments, etc. I think maybe I have a problem! I guess trauma got me, too. 

In an effort to better understand what had happened to me, I did some research and stumbled upon this article. It makes so much sense! I seek out projects that I can control (unlike the uncontrollable life I’ve been dealt), and I overfill my to do list in an effort to produce more adrenaline, that strangely comforting hormone that I became addicted to after it propelled me through two years of trauma. 

It feels sort of like defeat to admit that the trauma of the last two years has affected me. After all, I was so proud of how “well” I was handling everything. But at the same time this realization is freeing. I don’t have to find ways to be productive every minute of every day – in fact, I shouldn’t! And while that’s uncomfortable, maybe I can put that energy into working through the grief and lack of self-care that’s accumulated over the past 24 months. Can I do this without approaching it as a task? Ask me next August.

Smoke

Smoke. 

This transparent, little white whisp of a thing; see-through, innocent, a by-product. When you burn a little fire the smoke is white or maybe black but it curls up lazily in unpredictable patterns, never the same twice. It’s barely there, unassuming, hardly claiming existence. The white variety even seems to possess an innocent, pure, holy quality to it, just like snow except that it yearns for the clear sky instead of the riotous and dirty ground. 

But this thing lies. It is deceptive. It wreaks complete, scorched-earth warfare in a very concrete way, all the while masquerading as delicate and weak. Do not be fooled.

This thing is a wrecking-ball, a cozy Sherman tank sitting in the fire pit in your backyard and you seek it out when it is cold. You will inhale it into your lungs and it will destroy them like a shell in a foxhole. It will cause cancer to break out in your body and nothing will ever be the same. Your family will suffer and you, too, will suffer more than you ever knew you could. You will spend all of your time in hospital rooms and at doctor’s appointments and you will learn what different drugs feel like and you will schedule your days around the taking of them. You will travel long distances and your children will get lots of “grandma time”. Nurses will wipe your ass and your wife will have to give you sponge baths and the saddest part is that this will begin to feel normal. You will think that your humiliation is complete until you discover a new, more complete form of it waiting just around the corner, and sooner than you think. It will be utterly and completely awful and soul-shatteringly beautiful all at the same time and you will both love it and hate it, this thing we harmlessly call smoke.

Altitude

 I am utterly, utterly, unbelievably, and soul-shatteringly exhausted.

I am lying on the ground under the pines, listening to water tumbling over the smooth, round rocks in the stream just to my left and the wind tickling the tops of the trees, with my legs resting in a patch of scratchy heather and my back pricked by brown pine needles, my small pack tucked under my head and bending my head too far forward. Two mountains claw their way three thousand feet into the sky behind me, and I can hardly believe that I was just on top of one of them, nor how little satisfaction it provided. My last thought is that  those pine needles are going to stick to the back of my shirt like glue before I blend into the scene, become a part of it, no longer myself but just a part of the landscape, and I don’t care, because I am no longer upright- a state for which I’ve been intensely yearning for for twelve hours. Moments later I am asleep right there under the clouds which are trying hard to gather enough momentum to burst forth into a magnificent, ecstatic, and cathartic afternoon thunderstorm.

It all started twelve hours ago, at 2:45 a.m. That’s when my watch alarm went off, chirping into the alien peace of a three hour night’s sleep spent at eleven-thousand feet underneath a sky clear enough to watch the milky way spin its eternal circles around me. I was cold when I woke up. It was in the eighties at home at this time of the day, but here it was closer to thirty. Forgetting the lessons I’d learned from dozens of mountains before, I neglected to eat a heavy meal the night before, meaning that by the time we awoke my metabolism was no longer churning through the calories and keeping me warm. There’s something unique and absurdly pleasurable about leaving the warmth and softness of a puffy down sleeping bag to strike out into the crisp cold of an alpine morning, though, so before long I was sitting in the doorway of the tent willing my already slightly numb toes into even colder, stiffer boots.

Soon the familiar routine was complete and, under the red light of my headlamp, my low-weight, high calorie pop-tart rested contentedly in my belly, each item in my pack had been carefully selected and placed in its designated “accessible” or “non-accessible” location, the clothing layers had been adjusted just right so that I would be cold when I started moving but warm up to just the right temperature as soon as I started moving. It all seemed so comfortingly familiar and easy, I thought, just like it used to be. This time I didn’t even need to worry about figuring rope lengths between climbers or checking to ensure I had all of my crevasse rescue gear (an ever-evolving assortment of pulleys, ice screws, and cordolette), put the skins on my skis, or find my ice axe.

But then, there was the one thing… A small reminder, really, that this was not like all the other mountains, and it came just before our small circles of light blazed out into the darkness like explorers from younger times when there were still blank spots on the map. That is, I had to take my chemo pills. I tried, I really did. And then I gagged and puked all over the ground in front of our tent. I even got a little on the part of my puffy down coat right in front of my nose, which would smell like vomit all day, some on my pants, a little on my shoe, and I buried one of the tent stakes in a pile of pop-tart. Great, I thought, I was starting out the day without all of the drugs I needed to get through a normal day, let alone one like this, but my buddy James understood what this day meant and, instead of questioning out loud whether we should continue, simply gathered some pine needles and covered up the mess, then looked up at me with the question, “well, are you ready yet?” in his eyes. God bless him, I thought, for not questioning. He should have questioned, he wanted to question, but God bless him for not questioning. We shouldered packs and moved out, neither one of us entirely sure our planned daily activities were a good idea.

This was certainly the easiest mountain I’d climbed in the last decade, and I had selected it for that purpose since I had no idea how wrecked I’d feel at altitude after a year of cancer treatment while still on chemo. The approach is insanely easy and there’s very little commitment- you can bail at any time if you see storms approaching. The trail itself is well-maintained and not very remote. The mountain is actually many people’s first 14,000’’+ peak to visit. It’s much closer to lots of uphill hiking than actual alpinism, the kind to which I have grown accustomed in fifteen years climbing from Asia to Alaska that requires technical knowledge, sound judgment, and a level of commitment that, at some points, requires action that means life or death. But I just needed a win this year, something easy, both as a celebration of finding myself in cancer remission and a proclamation to my own soul that I was back to what I love doing most. I resolved to keep it down to one mountain, though and to only climb it with perfect weather conditions and a strong partner with all the right equipment and research. All of those things rarely coalesce in the mountains, but on this day, they actually had.

The climb wasn’t quite the win I was looking for, though. During the time it took me to get up and down that easiest of mountains, I was passed by little kids the same age as my own and elderly people much older than my own parents. Before the sun rose, when it was just my tiny circle of light and the darkness enveloping me, I was so dizzy that I was forced to use trekking poles just to stay upright and I stumbled from one side of the trail to the other like Otis from Andy Griffith. I knew James was concerned, but he mercifully didn’t mention it. The experience was disorienting and nauseating, but dizziness has, of late, become like an old but always annoying friend who drops by unexpectedly and often. So, rather than allowing my altered cochlear activity to disturb me like it might have someone witnessing the effort, I started to laugh at my own pathetic pep-talks to myself that I “mumbled as I bumbled” (that gave me a good chuckle).

And the first mantra was this: Don’t Stop. “Don’t stop,” I told myself, as each step became harder. Just don’t stop. You don’t think you can make it to the top, but just don’t stop. You can always take one more step. Always one more. Over and over and over. Just don’t stop. Soon we were above treeline. Just don’t stop. James is waiting. We worked our way around what would be a mountain at home but barely counted as a hill here. Just don’t stop. Just don’t stop. One more step. James is waiting. We made it to the final push- a series of who-knows-how-many switchbacks over tallus right up to the summit. Just don’t stop. Just don’t stop. One more step. James is waiting. And then suddenly I was on top. I took a nap. I ate a lemon pepper tuna packet. And then we descended, which somehow felt like it took ten times as long as the ascent, with quads burning the whole time and stumbling over over loose rock, hating the larger steps down for the way they jarred my knees. And then I stole this stupid good climber from Czechia’s mantra- “a muerte,” which means, “to death”, in Spanish. God, it felt like a death march. How could the trail back be this much longer than the trail up? And then, when I finally saw our tent, I swear the distance grew longer as I approached it.

And then I was there, lying in the heather and the pine needles, looking up at a newly-clouded sky after my sleeping. James was patiently leaning against a tree not far away, presumably contemplating the stream in front of him. We weren’t finished for the day, and he knew it, but he also knew I couldn’t go any further. We were out of water, which was an especially prickly predicament for those of us belonging to the Mono-kidney Club at altitude taking chemo meds. Because of our lack of water, we had to descend more. There was more to be done that day. Sleeping bags to be stuffed, tents to be rolled, more distance to cover… too many things to contemplate all at once. I sat up, James looked my way at the noise, and we began. Soon, we shouldered packs and headed out with more to do, always more, the struggle never ending.

And I have to say that although I may have stood on top of it, I don’t feel like I got my victorious win from Grays Peak. Despite what I’m able to believe during my everyday life, I’m not back to normal after a year of cancer. I am much, much weaker physically than I had hoped, and there was no ignoring it on that mountain. There was more mourning than celebrating on that trail. I’m happy and I’m grateful for having survived many things in this life that should have killed me- stage 4 cancer being high on the list, but up there where the thin air was clouded by the distant wildfires, I couldn’t help but feel bitter and angry. It’s not fucking fair. I’m sorry for the language, but that sentence needs the intensity it brings. It’s not fucking fair. I didn’t ask for cancer. I didn’t ask for any of this. All I ever wanted was to live my little life with my little family in our little corner of the world and then be forgotten in a few years, but here I was feeling, as James wrote so well a little after our trip, “mournful, decimated, overwhelmed, and angered.” I’ve lost so much, even my ability to enjoy the place where I most readily commune with God.

So the mountain didn’t give me what I asked of it, and as I’m writing this I’m two blocks from M.D. Anderson waiting for appointments tomorrow where doctors will tell me if the cancer has returned, still wondering if this life is going to give what I ask of it. I’m scared, even six months after treatment has ended.  But if there’s anything to learn from Grays peak, it has to be that things will unabashedly and stubbornly be as they will be, and that we have absolutely no control over them.  I can’t force a mountain to provide resolution to a year of cancer any more than I can herd cats, but instead we should, as Shunryu Suzuki rightly said, “accept everything as it is without difficulty,” because right there, in the still, silent eye of the hurricane of suffering in our temporal lives, we will find stillness, comfort, and a peace beyond understanding. It is only from this place that we can even begin to love truly in a way that forgets self and sees the beloved with clarity, which is the end for which we all were created, the round peg that fills the holes in all of our hearts. It is only from this place that we can begin to live.

Today I am grateful for Grays Peak- that high point in the dirt to which we will all return. I puked at its feet and I slept on its head and I suffered much in between, and that suffering was as sweet as drinking from the crystal-clear, cold, streams that hurry down its flanks only to return, year after year, like Sisyphus to his summit.

 

Dreaming

I read today that, “nichts ist menschlicher, als zu trauemen.” That is, “nothing is more human than to dream.” I think that might be true. It might just be what separates us from animals and the rest of the world in which we’re immersed.

We dream. And that dreaming has caused all of human history. Our dreaming gives rise to our hopes and our desires, and along with those come fear and clinging. Everything from the most horrific war crimes to the most selfless of acts, the giving of oneself for another, comes from our dreams.

It seems that we mostly dream of better things to come. We dream that one day soon we will make more money or have a bigger house or just one more kid. Or maybe we’re on the opposite end of the spectrum and our idea of better things looks like adventures in far-flung countries that we can meticulously photograph and carefully curate on instagram or tick-tock or whatever the latest social media platform is so that we can at least convince others that our dreams are coming true, even if we don’t believe it ourselves.

But do we ever get there, to the better things? I make three times as much money as I did at my first real job, but it sure doesn’t feel like it. My current house is two and a half times as big as the first little rent house Emily and I moved into right after we were married, but somehow there was space for just as much love in that first house as our current one . And I’ve tried the other end of the spectrum, too, all to no avail. Even the pursuit of eye-catching facebook pictures via Alaskan mountaineering expeditions to the tops of some of the world’s tallest peaks or the self-satisfaction of telling tales of peering over the continental shelf into a black void that is the bottom of the world underneath 100 feet of water fail to deliver the much-sought-after dream that I have finally arrived, that everything is as as it should be, that there is nothing left to do and I can finally rest.

So I think that for now I will put aside my dreams. That sounds terribly depressing, I know, and goes straight against the whole American narrative of dreaming big and working hard to achieve that dream. Maybe putting aside my dreams makes me un-American, or maybe less human. I don’t know. But whatever the case, that model just doesn’t work any more. Nope.

Instead, I think I’m just going to quit, and be here. I’m going to quit my striving. I’m going to quit my running from suffering, quit panicking whenever hard things come my way, quit fearing the unknown, and quit the never-ending treadmill race that is the pursuit of material happiness. In their place, I think I’ll just be, right here and right now. We’re so accustomed to these old habits that it seems impossible to shed them, but why should it be? I think it’s worth the trouble, because right now is a pure and lovely place to be. It really is what we’ve been dreaming about all along. It’s the melody that snow-melt plays under rocks as it returns to the ocean, or the infinite color palette of a sunrise gently playing out on its canvas of clouds. It’s the comfort of listening to the person you love most dearly breathing gently next to you in the dark and the wonder in the way that tree leaves in the wind sound exactly like ocean waves. It’s an uncontrollable belly laugh after a raunchy joke with friends after one too many pints or the little twinge of fear, even when you’re too grown up to admit it, when you hear the first low rumbles of thunder from an approaching storm.

Right now is so damn beautiful that it breaks my heart, and I don’t want to miss it dreaming of what could be, because those things I’m dreaming of are already here.

Ground

I’m terrified.

I’m terrified of the impermanence of life, that I will die. And it’s not just that I will die, it’s that I may die too young, without getting to experience all of the things that I want to experience. I suppose I’m greedy for experience, for seeing the kids grow old and sitting on the porch with Emily when we’re wrinkly and for having a a bittersweet retirement party one day from the fire department.There are just a lot of things that I want to do still, and if I die from cancer at a young age, I won’t ever get to see them.

And not just that, but it will bring hardship on my family. I love them all, each one individually, so much so that I can’t bear the thought of being the cause of more hardship in their lives. They deserve so much happiness.

So because of those things, I am terrified. But I’m beginning to suspect that the state of terror isn’t such a “bad” one, for lack of a better word. For some reason, there’s a negative, unpleasant feeling attached to it, and I think that’s really what is so distasteful about it. When that’s removed, though, being scared is tolerable. It’s something that I can allow to be alongside me, and I don’t need to panic and immediately try to eradicate it.

And I’m surprised to say that right here, in this entirely groundless state, is where I want to be. So much suffering is caused by our attempts to find solid ground. When we allow ourselves to just not know, however, possibilities for joy and kindness and compassion open up that we never knew we’d see. But I think that only people who have been through suffering and have been forced to live without solid ground can easily choose to continue living that way. I’ve watched Band of Brothers recently, and it seems like veterans experience this, too. Suffering can free us from our conception that we should seek the pleasant and flee from the unpleasant, and this creates space in our hearts for warmth and love and gentleness.

So I think my cancer and then this crazy pandemic, which is just the particular form that suffering took in my life recently, was a great gift. It pulled the ground out from underneath me and showed me that it’s okay here. And I’m really shocked to say that I prefer it here, in the uncomfortable space of not knowing.

I have to laugh, though, when I still catch myself all the time trying to solidify things. I find that my habit of doing so is especially tenacious as it concerns my identity, and with that, my ego. I think all the time, “I really like the way I look when I do such and such,” or, “people will really think that I’m this or that kind of guy now that I’m…” I’m really hilariously vain, and I can’t shake the habit of trying to establish a self-approved identity in some way. I'm even thinking about what people will think about me when they read this. So it goes.

And that’s kind of how everything is, isn’t it? It just goes. We think we know, but we don’t. We do, but we don’t. We learn, we work, we suffer, we rejoice, and sometimes we even love purely and without ulterior motives. And at the bottom of it all there is a great impartiality to life that is both terrifying and life-giving. I don’t know what to think of it, but I don’t have to know. None of us do. That’s the sigh of relief, the exhalation when you finally lay down to rest at the end of a long day. We don’t have to know. We don’t have to decide. We don’t have to have an opinion. We just have to be, and that’s the one thing we’ve all been successfully doing since the day we were born and will continue to do until the day we draw our last breath, whether it’s after a long, blessed life or far too soon.

The Other Shoe

In 36 hours I will be free of cancer. I can’t believe I even get to write those words! Doing so was never a given. And, my God, there have been some rough times trying to get to writing them. There have been times when I just looked at my wife, crying, and asked her, begged really, if it would always be like this. Times when I physically hurt so badly that it broke my spirit, something that had never happened before and which I didn’t think possible until it was. I’ve certainly had some trying times before. As an alpinist, I have survived alone crossing crevassed mountains at altitude in a whiteout with only the snacks in my pockets and no shelter. As a runner, I have run marathons when my body ran entirely out of glycogen and I just kept going anyways. As a firefighter, I have been in rooms hotter than your oven- rooms that lit the wooden chock on my helmet on fire, crinkled the leather shield on my helmet, and caused my body to involuntarily scramble for egress out of sheer animal panic. But still, in the last seven months and four days I have felt more pain than I thought I would in my entire lifetime.

And you know, it’s funny how Emily and I used to always talk about how lucky we were to be living the life we did and how the other shoe was certain to drop soon. Then, BAM! Turns out that other shoe is a real bitch. But still, we’re about as lucky a pair as you’re likely to find. Our kids are healthy. We have such amazing friends and family- people who continue to care for us even long after my diagnosis when you’d think they would begin to forget. We live in a country that allows us to do what we want and are part of a church community that accepts and loves broken people like us. And now, we’ve even come to appreciate cancer’s lessons.

And today’s lesson is this: each day matters. You think you have an unlimited number of days on this Earth, that somehow you are the first immortal being, but you’re not. This all comes to an end some day, and whatever it is you think happens afterwards begins. I don’t say it to sound sound morbid, I say it to bring hope. Now is the time to forgive. Now is the time to live. Now is the time to do something you always wanted to but never thought you could. Life, beautiful life, is happening right now, and you get to be a part of it. But don't get distracted. Money comes and goes, jobs are fleeting, and the grass on your front lawn will keep growing back. Instead, take a risk and love people and be vulnerable with them. Don’t just exist, but live abundantly. Hug your kids like it’s the last time. Tell your wife you love her. Even if you get hurt in the end, it’s worth it. In this life, there is no practice for something else and there is no dress rehearsal. This is your one and only shot- make it count.

I feel this truth now, deep down in my bones in a way I never could have before. I don’t really expect to live to a ripe old age anymore. I know that may sound incredibly sad, but I realize that, while I may have won this battle with cancer, there is a war going on, and I might not win the next battle. And it’s not sad. In fact, it’s the most hopeful thing I’ve learned from cancer so far, because it taught me this most important thing: the “why” of cancer. You want to know why cancer happens? Because life happens, and a benevolent God doesn’t want us to miss it. I’m not going to miss it. Don’t you miss it, either.

“Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain!” – Jack Kerouac