A Cancer Quintet

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A Cancer Quintet Poetry by Dr. J. Stephen Cleghorn in memory of his wife Dr. Lucinda Hart-González March 31, 1950 - November 14, 2011

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June 17, 2011 “There is a mass.”

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1. The Scattering She says to me: “I can have ideas, but not plans” as she struggles through the chemotherapy, while I perforce conjoin with her, husbanding this unknown and unreasoned futurity. The chaos of cancer completely un-sutures the common purpose that once healed us of all terror. All loneliness foresworn by vows of marriage now mutates into an unbounded scattering. A “scattering,” so says Merriam-Webster, taken from its sense in physics I suppose, “is a random change in direction of the particles constituting a beam or wave front due to collision with particles of the medium traversed.” Just so my particular heart, when the medium traversed is cancer.

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2. Already Gone The chemotherapy clamps down her tongue. Conversations with her are all wax and wane. She seems already gone, into a world only her own, bounded within her unique geography of pain. The border to where she lives cannot be crossed. How dare I place my utterances next to hers? I can speak only of present concerns instantly gone stale in the very telling of them. While she lives at the silver edge of the cloud of unknowing. I who love her send in my messages, but from her come words that seem as though xenoglossia of some netherworld. Our marriage is now all about translations.

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3. “Cocktail” That’s what they call the mix of drugs coursing through my wife’s wasting-away body. Or else the “broad spectrum” approach that the military calls in its wars “Destroying the village in order to save it.” So here’s to the fiery potions of Big Pharma! Huzzah! We love the smell of $100 dollar a pill potions as they war against the cancer in her frail frame. So let’s hear it, All: Our “Cheers!” to this sobriquet given to us by the fine doctors who battle cancer. (They are fine people, actually, not the only ones by any means whose words fail to access the suffering while they seek diligently to domesticate it. We all do that, we must admit.)

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3. “Cocktail” (continued) So “Cheers!” to the lying down in the infusion bed. And “Cheers!” to the days-of-the-week plastic box my wife uses to organize all her pills to counteract the lying down in the infusion bed. Our toasts these days are necessarily incendiary as we witness our beloved one’s body quaffing the latest elixir of the latest science re: the late ones. So let us today toast the body count of our ignorance. Intoxicated by the fiery “cocktail” (we cannot seem to stop talking of its sweet powers) that calls us to Hope while Despair sulks like the unwelcome party guest over in the corner there. Plotting his revenge against all those who would dare tipple upon the very idea of Hope.

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Parting Words (Oh bless the continuous stutter of the Word being made into flesh. - L. Cohen) Ever the linguist, through the terror and pain of death onrushing, Lucinda smiles as a good professor would do, inviting her daughters to understanding. "I will watch over you," she says, but then adds: "maybe not every letter of the alphabet; but I will watch over you." The times will come, she knows, when the characters of comfort will be composed by her daughters, not her words to shape anymore, but words capable of composition from a lexicon she leaves as legacy, morphemes of that private language between mother and child. So that never shall her daughters be rendered inarticulate by life's challenges, even unto their deaths .

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5. Thanksgiving 2011 A death observed in the not observing of it. My family’s life pulses forward while my wife Lucinda’s life recedes. Only ten days gone now, she. We speak little of her, beyond a song I share with grandchildren, telling them I sang it to her as she lay dying. Surely not understood by them except for the love evident in the singing. I feel both at home and set apart. Today misunderstanding shall be the best knowledge afforded us. Not their fault. They love me to be sure. But love imposes limits on a grief that dares to intrude its order on this day, and who knows how many more to come?

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Dr. Lucinda Hart-González

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J. Stephen Cleghorn www.paradisegardensandfarm.com