The Light You Bring

Love and family right at the front.

“There’s a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” — Leonard Cohen.

I’m less than a week from the surgery and it’s blunting my edges like an SSRI. I’d like to feel more. I wish I could experience the beauty of sadness or joy, but I just can’t get there. I’m numb.

Is this my biology beginning to do what it needs to do to keep me sane? Is my neural network preparing for trauma? Am I shifting into true survival mode?

On a recent dark and stormy summer afternoon, I opened Dr. Patrick Walsh’s Guide to Surviving Prostate Cancer. Tiny needle-like raindrops pricked at the metal roof as I skimmed the section on leaky catheters and post-op deep vein thrombosis.

Typically, the gathering of information has been a balm for my wandering anxious thoughts since I started this ordeal. Not so now. For the first time, reading about the things that could go wrong during and after the surgery has become a hostile act. I’m barreling toward the knife, so it’s no use trying to slow my roll with heavy thoughts of what could impede the inevitable. Better to stay numb and barrel faster.

And yet, here I sit examining my existence like a dime store Socrates.

The goal with the surgery is to remove all the cancer, but that’s not always possible. The corrupted angry cells could have spread to the edges of the organ and broken through the thin layer of cells and into the nerve bundles and lymph nodes at its periphery. When the doctor cuts into my body and inserts his cameras and robotic tools and he actually sees my prostate and the black tumor growing there, things could look worse than they did in the imaging. He may have to take more than he wants, which could mean the start of a longer, more-uncomfortable and painful chapter.

I could keep going down this dark path, but see above, numbness. Also, it’s not helpful. Based on my PSA (5.74), my biopsy (Gleason 4+3 found in only one of two cancerous cores), and my PET scan, which showed no cancer anywhere outside the organ, the chance that the doctor will remove all the corrupted cells is far more likely than not. It’s also true that my relatively young age and my good health will work in my favor.

The truth is I’m trying to live in the hopeful and much higher probability that things will go well for me. Whether that’s hollow or misplaced doesn’t matter. It’s where I have to be. To live in the small numbers where complications happen is too dark and scary, and the thought of it would eventually crush me — is trying to crush me now. I’m not yet ready to live in such confined places.

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Nobody was home when I walked into the expansive front room of our house on Saturday afternoon. It was bathed in a pale northern light, and in the silence, I realized how much of a sanctuary it has become, how orderly and peaceful and easy we’ve made it. I thought of the people I have the privilege of calling my family and what a gift it is to feel truly connected to them — what a joy it is to experience their becoming.

After publishing Knife, a memoir of being attacked and stabbed and then surviving that attack, Salman Rushdie talked to Ezra Klein about what it means to have been given a second act that he wasn’t supposed to have.

“Love and family are right at the front of my head now,” he said. “In whatever time I have left, that’s what I want to focus on. The priority now is to lead a life of loving and being loved.”

It’s not just that there’s so little time left to do the things you have to do. It’s that there’s so little time left to open your arms to the people and the community you’ve built a life with and tell them over and over how much light they bring to the darkness.