Making Sense of Remarkable Things

Squaring the momentous with the everyday.

Photo by George Schaller

“Your Substack readers are eagerly awaiting your next post,” said the text from my brother in law, Rob. It’s been about 6 weeks since the surgery to remove my ruined-by-cancer prostate.

“If I didn’t already know the outcome, I’d be on the edge of my seat wondering how the heck everything turned out.”

Equally thrilled at the possibility of having actual readers and gloomy at the reality of not being able to write anything new for them, I relayed the exchange to Celeste.

“Yeah, I guess everyone thinks you died,” she said.

It’s true that I’m stuck. I was writing a ton leading up to the surgery. I was on a roll. But now? Now I can’t even seem to find the time to complain in my morning journal. Something has changed.

The casual observer might rightly point out that of course something has changed. I just had surgery to remove cancer from my body.

Newsflash for all my readers who are not family members (if in fact there are any): The procedure worked! The pathology test of the excommunicated prostate confirmed that the cancer was entirely contained within the organ. I’m officially cancer free.

In a weird way, I wonder if this is part of the problem. While hurtling toward the knife, I was gliding along a live-in-the-moment edge with my writing. Existential dread can be such a powerful muse. Now what am I supposed to write about? The sad painful recovery? Life as a cancer survivor?

The truth is, I don’t feel worthy of that label. My cancer was caught early and treated in a matter of months, and I’ve seen others go through far worse for far longer. How can I be a survivor without having suffered like them?

I’m not suggesting what I’ve been through hasn’t been meaningful. Regardless of how quickly I removed cancer from my body, I did still glimpse death’s sullen face. For a few significant months I contended with my own ending and the life I’d lived, or did not live.

But now what? What I’m supposed to do with what just happened? In the aftermath of momentous moments in life, how can we simply go back to the old routines?

In The Snow Leopard, author Peter Matthiessen sets out with the scientist George Schaller on a two-month trek in Nepal to catch a glimpse of the elusive Himalayan cat. Matthiessen’s wife of many years has just died and the loss has brought about profound grief and painful questions about meaning in life.

The two traveling companions come close to seeing the leopard, but they never quite do. The “ghost of the mountains” is always just out of sight, just missed, just beyond the next rise. Really, the book is about Buddhist ideas of impermanence and “the calm acceptance of everything that comes.” It’s a beautiful paean to carrying on even when a deeper understanding of pain and suffering is as elusive as the snow leopard.

“The absurdity of a life that may well end before one understands it does not relieve one of the duty to live it through as bravely and as generously as possible,” Mathiessen writes.

I like to imagine what the author did after this grand journey into the spirit world of the mountains. I see him getting on a flight back to London, picking his kids up from his parent’s house, and then carrying on with a perfectly mundane life of grocery shopping, school drop-offs, soccer practices, and work. How did Mathiessen square his life-changing adventure set against the fading prayer flags and Buddhist stupas with his precious little life back home?

And what of my own journey into the face of death and back? What do I take from it as I adjust back into the daily grind? How do I capture it enough? Do I capture it at all?

I suppose I’d rather experience momentousness than not, even if it puts the everyday into sharp relief. I’d rather glimpse death than not because it reinforces my own fleeting life. Knowing the mysterious, even if we can’t understand it, gives us the ability to recognize what’s beautiful in every moment, big and small. “Tis better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all,” as Tennyson put it.

Walter starts high school this week. There are deadlines at work. My father is descending further into dementia. I have to meet a contractor at the house to fix a broken window. We have a soccer game in Houston on Saturday. The scars on my abdomen are still visible from the surgeon’s scalpel, and I’m writing again. Onward through the fog.