"Who am I anyway? Am I my resume? That has a picture of a person I don't know." A line from the musical A Chorus Line that has always stuck with me. Suddenly I feel like that character, staring blankly at his 8X10 black and white glossy that he paid a fortune to get made, and wondering if it really portrays me, who I am. . . and the big question that lurks behind every head shot decision is really "who AM I?"
My whole life when asked this piercing question, I've always given the knee-jerk answer that I am "A Child of God." I wish I could say I'd given that answer out of absolute certainty. It seems that's how we start in life, just a child of God. We come out and we don't even know we are a daughter or a sister. We have no aspirations and no fears, no relationships. We are nothing but "A Child of God." However, as life moves on we begin to identify ourselves. First as a daughter and sibling, a grandchild, a niece, but then as a student, a friend, a worker, a Catholic, a musician, a singer, a teacher, a friend, a performer, a scrapbooker, an herb gardener, a wife, a mother. . . Sometimes we get side tracked and have personal identities that shouldn't be there: an alcoholic or a drug abuser, a gambler or a glutton, a sex addict, a liar, a thief, a cheater, a hypocrite. . . and on and on. Hopefully we try to shed ourselves of some of these identities. . . for many in our culture, our identities circle directly around our appearance. I have beautiful hair, I have beautiful skin, I'm thin, I'm fat, I'm short, I'm tall. . . So that's who we ARE. . . .
But perhaps, true holiness, TRUE holiness is shedding ourselves of ALL our identities except that first one. I can honestly say that cancer is doing for me something like what a nun or monk does for themselves as they enter their order. They give up all their identities. They renounce all earthly relationships, throw out all their hobbies and possessions, cut their hair and don unflattering clothes, and commit to a lifestyle of obedience and put all their attention day and night to that one big original "I am a Child of God."
Cancer has taken my identities from me. First I was healthy, and I am now a chronically sick person. If you've never made this leap, you cannot imagine how difficult and traumatic it is to go from "super preferred" to "hanging on by a thread." As I write this, I am sick to my stomach the day after chemo and two days after my third surgery this month. I have an electric drug pump automatically pumping meds into my body which I carry everywhere, along with my throw up bucket. It's official I am no longer a healthy person. Identity taken.
Cancer has taken my beauty. I am bald, and I look like a freak. My weight fluctuates between the steroid induced weight-gain and the inevitable weight loss post chemo treatments. I am too tired to dress fancy everyday or do makeup. I save these energy sapping efforts for Sunday Mass and teaching days.
Cancer has taken my energy. I no longer want to exercise, most days I struggle to pick up my baby girl. Many days, because of the dopiness caused by the drugs I don't dare try. I have no power to do the laundry or clean the house. I have not made my husband a meal in months. I have to helplessly sit on the sofa for days at a time, watching stupid tv. Reading often takes too much energy. . .
Cancer has taken my career. Two conductors who had hired me to sing large gigs this Spring have called and out of necessity fired me. It's completely understandable. I'm too high risk. But I've cancelled the rest. It's just not fair to them.
Cancer has taken my singing voice. I have no energy to sing. I don't know what is wrong with me. My friend in NY who is going through all the same treatments I am, has enough energy to continue singing and training. I try to sing to my little baby and I can barely whimper out her little nursery rhymes.
Cancer has taken my financial independence. I am teaching when I can, but cancelling more often because I am in the hospital or too sick and tired to appear before people. I'm officially a drain.
I am no longer a scrapbooker or an herb gardener. I am totally unavailable to my family - I can barely call occasionally to give them updates. I am not a godmother or an aunt anymore. Am I a mother? Today I shipped my child out to someone else's home because I couldn't care for her. Yesterday and tomorrow her father will do everything. Will I be well enough this time to care for her at all?
With all of this comes this unexpected grief. When you get cancer, you have to grieve yourself. All of these are identities that you have to watch die and let go of. One by one. Might they all return someday? Possibly, but saying good bye to a husband who is off to Afghanistan for a year can't be easy either can it? And neither she nor I know if they'll be back. It might be a permanent departure.
I had to grieve. First my health, then my fertility, then one by one as the weeks have gone by, another part of me and then another. The process always the same for each identity you have (and you don't realize how many you have until they start peeling away). "Oh no! Not that! I can't live without that! I want to be a mommy again!" Then "I don't want to lose my hair! I've had it my whole life!" Then the rest one by one, each with their own grieving process. It takes months. I'm not done yet, I'm sure of it.
It takes me time. But some people don't seem to need to grieve. My husband doesn't seem to grieve anything. When they told us we'd probably be infertile, It took me weeks of crying and anger to accept the chemo treatments with an open heart. My husband said "okay" in the first doctor's office, and that was it. Weeks later, we got into a huge fight, our first since marriage, when he told me to give up my children's choir because it would put me at risk for serious illness. The only time I can ever remember fighting seriously with him. He was fine with it, right away, and didn't understand why I stubbornly held on to my hopes. . . .Eventually I got both my oncologists to say I could do a rehearsal once every other week. . . but still, I'm not their director anymore.
So you grieve each new time. And just when you think you've stripped yourself of all your identities, something else comes up and you're stripped of that too. I wonder if it is fair to compare the cancer experience to that of the concentration camp victim. They too are stripped of all their identities. Everything, family, looks, clothes, jobs, Independence, down to their very humanity as they are slowly starved to death. In Victor Frankle's holocaust book called Man's search for Meaning he describes how, at the end of that stripping there is always something that the soldiers couldn't take away: your right to choose good or evil. He theorizes through his own camp experience, that his conscience never left him and no matter what, he was always himself because of that one thing, his freedom to choose good or evil.
Is this getting back to the bare minimum? Is this the "Child of God" I've always said I'd be? Stripped of everything I was clinging to, I'm left with my utter dependence on Him and my will to choose right and wrong. No hair or singing voice to hide behind. No popularity or world approval. No daughter to love.
And that is the clincher (in case you're all so depressed that you now want to commit suicide). I'm still here. I mean, there still IS a me under all those identities. I still like purple, and I sill laugh at my husbands jokes. I have no idea who I am anymore, but I am still here. And as I am stripped of my relationships one by one, to myself and to those around me, I find that the one original relationship is still there. It's a mess. It's in pieces all over the floor, covered by anger and resentment, and occasionally now trust and hope. But that one relationship "Child of God." doesn't seem to vanish no matter how hard cancer tries.
Funny, that nuns and monks choose this. With joy no less. I think I'm beginning to get that now. And a part of me hopes (Note I'm using the word hope again, but possibly in a more healthy manner now), that when my hair grows back and my life is restored after all of this, that I will hold on to that ONE relationship, and keep all the others loosely attached somehow. Love and love and love some more, but never again identify myself by worldly standards. And never never judge anyone else by them either. Mother Theresa saw each person as a Child of God, whether Hindu or Catholic, whether healthy and beautiful or dying of AIDS. She saw them all as what they were when they got here. And what they would leave this place as.
So all this grieving is actually a cause for rejoicing. There is, somewhere deep inside of me, a slight shallow "thank God!" that is echoing through my heart. Because as crazy as this sounds, I never want to go back.
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