Lost Things

It feels like I lost a lot yesterday. Things don’t appear neatly contained and packaged, their edges are no longer crisp and in focus. Right now they’re just fuzzy and undefined and unsettled. Honestly, I’m struggling even to contextualize what happened in the last few days and present it in a sensible manner.

I met a man yesterday whose job it is, who I am paying, to try his damndest to kill me. This oncologist designed a lethal cocktail of four poisons and a whole elaborate schedule just for Mr. One-In-A-Million here. He presented to me and Emily in very polished and professional tones, writing on the butcher paper of the propped-up head of the exam table in his very left-handed manner the names of the drugs and the time tables and a nice little graph at the bottom to show how my physical ability to handle the devastation he’s about to unleash on my unsuspecting body will evaporate over time. 

And I just sat there gazing out at him with a vapid expression on my stupid face nodding my head, completely unable to grasp that this is ME we’re talking about when he says he’s not sure he can cure me or discussing my left kidney’s prospects for continued existence or my ability to have kids after his Kevorkian-esque work is concluded.

And as if that isn’t enough, another, different type of chemo pill is currently making it’s way through the Postal Service to my home. So Death is supposed to arrive come rain or shine on Tuesday through my mail slot as well.  If I knew an assassin were driving towards me with a bullet with my name on it (he’s a very dramatic assassin), I’d be running away from that Death, right? But here I am leaning into this insane thing. Where do you find sense in this absurd act? I haven’t figured it out yet.

Emily and I were both just stunned for a few hours after the appointment. There’s a tropical storm camped out over Houston right now, and we walked out of the windowless exam room in which my fate was delivered to find fat raindrops scurrying down the large windows of the seventh floor waiting room on their way to contribute to the floodwaters gathering below. The rain, the darkness outside, our sadness, and the fact that we were now about two hours past lunchtime (forget about naptime) all seemed to be conspiring against us. We were stunned, hungry, and a little surprised that this particular Doc, who we’ve begun referring to as the Wizard Behind the Curtain because he’s one of the top two or three specialists in the world for adrenocortical cancer (“ACC” for those of us in the biz), was a lot more honest about the difficulty of defeating cancer than any doc has been previously. We were not in a great place.

I didn’t really expect this doctor’s visit to stun me like this, so I was caught off guard and I still haven’t been able to reorient myself to reality. And as I try to figure out why I was hit so hard by the news that I would be imbibing these particular medications in these particular doses for this particular number of weeks, I think it can only be because the blinders were just ripped from my eyes.

You see, I’ve been hoping for the best since my diagnosis. Since you’re watching all this go down from what is hopefully a much more objective standpoint than me, you all probably found it much easier to visualize the reality of how this is going to play out than I did and knew this all along. But while you’ve already probably wondered what Levi will look like without eyebrows, I’ve been busy telling myself that I’ll probably just be put on some immunotherapy that won’t really have any side effects besides fatigue and it’ll probably only be for a very short time because my body will respond in a best case scenario kind of way and everything will be all rainbows and unicorn sharts. Today, though…shit. That’s not what’s going to happen.

I may be a special unicorn, but that doesn’t mean I’m exempt from any of the suck of cancer, or of life, as proven by the unique opportunity to double down on two chemo treatments at once, one of which was described by my Doc as “not an easy chemo” and which he likes to give with one week less recovery between bouts in the ring than most oncologists.

And it turns out that this naiveté isn’t the only thing I’ve lost or will lose. Because that’s what cancer does - it takes things from you. It takes them one at a time, but very steadily and it never stops. That’s why everybody is so damned afraid of it. We’re just afraid of loss. With cancer you lose plenty of physical things like hair and weight and kidneys, and these are bad enough. But what cancer really takes, and what everybody fears, are the internal losses. It damn sure takes your ego. It takes your dignity. It takes your privacy. It takes your sense of purpose and your work and, maybe worst of all, your time. It takes your identity - your masks - and if you’re not careful it just keeps right on taking and taking until it swallows up even the memory of you. And today it did just this- it took.

So now I’m sitting here blindsided and shell-shocked with a high-pitched whine in my ears, surprised to be seriously contemplating my own mortality and trying to make sense of the insensible. I’m asking myself, “could this be the end of my story?” For the first time in my life, and in a way that I don’t think any person can until the Grim Reaper has taken a long hard gander at them, I truly believe that the answer is yes. And the sudden intrusion of this weight onto my shoulders feels like loss of innocence. God, if I could only rewind to yesterday. But there’s no turning around once you start down this road. From this vantage point, the only way to life sounds a lot like death. But then, I think I’ve heard those words before. “Whoever would find his life will lose it.” So if that is true, then maybe loss isn’t the exception to the rule? Maybe loss IS the rule?

If this kind of upside-down logic that says losing life is the only way to find it is right, and if the nature of things makes loss the rule, then I can only conclude that life is the rule of things. And that means that all of the loss happening in my life right now, all of the things cancer is taking, somehow produces life too. Shalom, flourishing, is blooming.

And if this is the case, then there’s only one appropriate course of action: lose and live with abandon. Grab onto life with a big bear hug and squeeze until its eyes pop out. Walk right to the edge of that cliff and look over just to see what’s there. Go about life as though this is my one shot at it, because it is. After all, there is no preparation for something else. The chips are down, I’m all in, and, come hell or high water, I’d better be in it to win it, be it for months, years, or decades more.

That’s my plan, anyways. I’m taking in that loss and turning it back around to life. If I just keep doing that, cancer can win the battle but not the war. It’ll take and take like it does, but the loss of my things will never compare to the beauty that comes out of this. It’s like I’m standing too closely to a pointillism painting so that right now I can only see individual dots and the larger, more perfect picture is obscured from view by my very proximity to it. Yesterday was a shit day, no doubt about it, but the sun came up again this morning.

And the fact that this keeps happening makes me wonder: in the midst of so much loss, am I swimming in a sea of life and beauty right now and don’t know it?

I think maybe so.