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For Robin
by David Alan Goldstein
I have not slept for three nights…not well. I stand up and I am dizzy; there is a rail I needed to hang onto. It is nowhere, nowhere at least, that I can find it. I sway. At first I did not know why. I thought after the first sleepless night, after the second sleepless night, I would reach exhaustion…I would sleep then wake refreshed and I would be back…back to where I was... Normal. Everything just fine. But I have strayed further, much further than I thought…in fact so far that I am no longer myself…not the myself it took me so long to become.
“Peace of mind,” I said.
“That was my answer to her question: ‘What’s important to you?’ ”
Someone who asks a question like that over the first cup of coffee, I was bound to love. And I did, do, still, will, always.
I had it, then, when I answered her question. Peace of mind, firmly in my grasp so long ago, not so long ago…well, too long ago.
But I don’t have it now…peace of mind. And I cannot sleep.
It was for her that I did things. Felt good about it too, I did.
But love can lead you away…from your self.
There are things I did…for her. Shouldn’t have done. Or should I? And were they for her? Or were they for me? For love? Isn’t this what I wanted, what I always wanted…
love. Above all, there is love. Only love. Is that not true? Anyway, I believe it is. So I did these things, not for her, but for me…for love.
I am, though, further away from myself. From me. THE ME. A mistake? A miscalculation, a wrong step, a wrong turn, a…a what, exactly what?
There are times not to be yourself. Events demand it. Events can be large, larger than you are. There is no way to calculate love. Or cancer.
The cancer is hers. Not mine. And there are days when I can separate the cancer, her cancer, from me. But, the cancer is in me. I live with it too.
“I’m not doing chemo,” she said. “No more.”
It was taking pieces of her. A bump. Gone. Easy to take away. Not missed, not a bump. Then there was a breast--a whole breast, a tiny, tiny thing from her ballerina-like body, but a very large piece of her femininity--excised from her body like a curse. A curse that I had kissed, tongued, held…excised from her body…gone. What she lost, I lost too. We are in this together.
The cancer is mine.
It is mine and it is not mine.
She will die of this and I will live. I say that so that I can get used to it. So that I can plan…to be with her and not to be with her…to be with her forever and forever could be a very short time and then for a second forever, I will be, could be, might be, alone. That thing that I have feared: alone.
She was right to stop. Surgery had only taken. She had given enough…already… to surgery. And chemo still wanted, wanted pieces of her. Just a little hair, chemo said…a few clumps a day. Her hair clogged the bathroom drain every night. Once beautiful light blonde ringlets (when I met her, this is what an angel looks like, I thought)…now dark clumps on the drain.
Enough!
You’re right to stop. I agreed with her. Not for me. For her.
“I was doing it for you…partly…so I would live…longer.”
I did not cry at this. I’d cried enough. When the diagnosis was announced. When the breast got lopped off. (“My nipple, too,” she wailed). When she read me the statistics. When she lost her job, could not work. I was finished crying. Enough. Until I got home that night, then I cried.
About the things we would not do, the shortness of life, the clammy fear of being an old man alone.
She is beautiful. Her red scar across a resurrected breast is beautiful. I know she thinks it is ugly. Hides it…but, too, shows me sidewise glimpses of it just to see my reaction. She does not, cannot, look at me at times like this, but she can feel me, feel my thoughts. And I feel such tenderness for her then and she can sense this. I know, for the moment, everything is alright, not beautiful, not to her, but anyway, alright.
I have been sleeping in my own home lately. After a year abed together--her place, so like a woman, comfort and beauty everywhere--I am sleeping in my own bed alone, my empty house with cobwebs on the walls and dust on the furniture what little there is of it, damp gym laundry on the floor, the garden overgrown. But I must be away from cancer and, too, my house is the place where I think, where I make decisions. I have a particular chair for this where I have made every important decision of my life.
We will be living together soon. My house is being readied for her. We are doing the work, some of it, what we can, ourselves.
What more will I have to give to cancer? What pieces of myself? What will I give to Robin? Not everything because if I give it all away there will be no me. She will then have not me, just more cells gone aberrant…mine.
We will marry. This is unimportant to me. I have been married twice before. My tilt is against, but not strongly enough so. Robin proposed to me. And when you are proposed to by a beautiful woman you love…I feel wanted. Of course I said yes. No hesitation here.
Marriage is important to Robin. She is forty-seven, has a son, never been married. She lived with a man, the father, thirteen years.
I will take thirteen years though I want more. Thirteen years will make me sixty-five. I bargain with God. I am asking for my death before her, asking for her long life, for ten years…well then dammit, five. Five is too little. I take it back, God. I will not accept five.
I am grateful for today. And Robin is healthy. No sign of cancer anywhere, fully healthy though her body is marred, scarred, welted in places…unimportant places. She is alive and beautiful and glowing and I am in love.
Twenty years, God. Twenty.
I will not go back to church. What church? I have never been. And I do not believe in God (though I hedge my bets sometimes). I do believe in the power of prayer.
The mind and the heart create the body, corporeal life, this experience, and part of my “this” experience is through silent prayer (though I do not admit this to anyone; some things I keep to myself).
I am a happy man. Not mostly happy, not basically happy, not sometimes happy.
Rather I am happy. When I say sad things, when I write sad things, when I cry sad tears, it passes. Anger, too, cleanses me.
That we have cancer matters not. I know what matters…it is not cancer.
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