The Logistics of Heaven

The summer before I entered the fourth grade, my family moved from an urban neighborhood, with all kinds of houses and a shopping street a block away, to a suburban development of post-World War II nearly-identical ticky-tacky houses a mile or so away from…anything. To get to school, I either had to walk along a cornfield, where garter snakes sometimes slithered out from between the rows, or down an overgrown dirt path that bordered some woods, where I was sure unsavory types lurked, just waiting for the perfect victim (me) to come along.

I desperately missed my neighborhood, my school, my library, my friends. Worse, I’d been recognized as one of the best students in my class at my old school, the favored students had been in place since kindergarten. I was nobody.

In time, I made friends with a girl in my class—I’ll call her Cathy. She had shiny brown hair and brown eyes and beautiful olive skin. She lived in a brick house in a real neighborhood not far from our subdivision—a house with a basement, where her mother led our Girl Scout meetings every week. She had her own bedroom, pink, with white, frilly curtains on the windows and stuffed animals piled on her bed. She had nice clothes and her own record player. I adored her.

Every morning, from fourth through seventh grades, I walked to the end of our long block, then down the scary dirt path, turned left, walked to her house and knocked on the back door. Her mom let me in and I’d wait in the kitchen, chatting with her, until Cathy was ready. Then we’d set out for school together. Sometimes I was allowed to stay and play a while after school, or invited to come over on a Saturday.

In the spring of our seventh grade year, Cathy became enamored of a classmate I’ll call Bev, a ferret of a girl, ropy, with thin brown hair and a whole lot of what I now understand was sexual energy. She had breasts and a knowing air. I was still, physically, a child and completely clueless about sex, though I did have an agonizing, secret crush on a boy named Danny. I lived in a perpetual state of mortification. I had no idea how to navigate the dawning world of adolescence.

I still had Cathy to myself every morning, but only because Bev’s house wasn’t on our route. Increasingly, however, she avoided me at school. The two of them endured me at the lunch table; sometimes they invited me to go skating with them on Saturdays or to a sleepover. But I felt more and more awkward when I was with them, more aware that they didn’t really want me along. I invited them both to my birthday party in May, but only Cathy came—and I was pretty sure her mom had made her.

The two of them decided to go to Bev’s church camp that summer—and mentioned, without much enthusiasm, that I might come along. Though I was unhappy at home, I was paranoid about being away from home, especially for a whole week. But it seemed to me that if I didn’t go, it would be the end of my friendship with Cathy. Plus, the boy I liked was going, too, and I thought maybe, maybe he might notice me.

So I signed up, packed a borrowed duffel, and my dad delivered me to the church parking lot, where a school bus waited to take us to camp. Cathy and Bev sat together on the bus; I sat behind them, leaning forward to participate in their conversation as best I could. But soon the motion of the bus began to make me sleepy and a little nauseous. It was hot. Noisy. My head hurt. I leaned back and rested my cheek against the cool glass window, hoping to catch a bit of the breeze coming in from the raised part. I dozed, woke, dozed, woke—each time feeling a little worse. By the time we reached the first rest stop, I knew I was going to throw up—and dashed off the bus and into the smelly bathroom.

The bathroom was crowded when I came out of the stall. Cathy and Bev smiled slyly. They followed me out, teasing, then stopped to join a bunch of kids were congregated around a picnic table. I stood at the edges for a moment, then went on to the bus, where I noticed a folded piece of paper beneath Cathy’s seat—a note that she and Bev had been passing back and forth about all the things they didn’t like about me.

Had they left it there so I would find it?

I leaned against the window again and pretended to be asleep, listening to them talk about me. “P-U,” they said again and again, bursting into peals of laughter. I guess I did finally sleep, because I don’t remember anything else until, finally, we arrived at the camp.

They hurried off the bus, claimed a bunk bed to share—and, from then on, almost completely ignored me. Worse, the boy I liked came up to me about midway through the week, told me he really liked Cathy and asked if I’d try to talk her into liking him, too.

I’d never been that close to him before. He smelled sweaty, like the woods, with maybe a tinge of cigarette smoke. His voice squeaked and deepened as he spoke.

“Sure,” I said. “Yeah. I can do that.”

“Oh,” Cathy said, when I got up the nerve to approach her. “Him. Ugh.” And turned away from me.

We had Bible class every morning, which was at first comforting because it was like school—and school was a place where I knew what to do: be quiet, listen, raise your hand to ask or answer a question. Trouble was, my parents weren’t church people. We never talked about religion at home; I was only vaguely familiar with the Bible stories all the others seemed to know by heart.

I got curious.

Not in the way the camp leaders hoped, however, which would have led to my taking Jesus as my personal savior at the end of the week.

I got curious about how it worked.

As in, “So, were Adam and Eve cave people?”

They were the first people God made, right? And science had proved that the first people on earth were cave people.

It seemed a perfectly reasonable question to me—and a brilliant insight on my part.

It was met with dead silence from the camp leader—and laughter from my fellow campers.

I don’t remember how the leader eventually answered, just that it was in a disapproving tone, as if I had been making a joke. I do remember that I wasn’t stupid enough to ask the second question, the one that interested me the most.

How does heaven work?

Okay, it’s a place where the people you loved and who went before you will greet you at the golden gate and you will all be together forever. But what if you were married and your first husband died and you got married again and really, really loved that person? Which husband would you be with in heaven? And what if you loved someone, but that person didn’t love you and, for sure, didn’t want to be with you through eternity? Or someone loved you and you didn’t love him and didn’t want to be him forever?

Who got to choose?

Funny. It never occurred to me until right now, writing this, that the heaven question was connected to my feelings about Cathy. Or that if anyone had asked me then what heaven would be like for me, I might have said, “Being adopted into Cathy’s family and being best friends with her forever.”

It also hadn’t occurred to me that those unanswerable questions marked an important moment in my understanding of faith. Before they floated into my mind, I believed in God. I believed that good people went to heaven when they died and that, if I were good, I would end up there myself. After they floated into my mind, the whole enterprise began to seem, logistically, very sketchy to me.

Taken to the edge, for example—those basketball players who cross themselves before taking a free throw? Do they really think God is available to help with such things? And if they do, shouldn’t they just take their chances on the free throw so he can concentrate on, say, world peace? Or just feeding a family in the inner city?

It took me years to understand that religious faith is irrational. It’s just there, inside you, as reliable and enduring as the sun. Questions are inevitable—the most common being, “Why?” Some examine their questions about faith more deeply than others. But true faith doesn’t need a logical answer.

Some of the most intelligent people I know are people of faith. I respect and envy them. True faith makes life easier, I think—especially if it ensures a place in heaven.

I am a person of faith myself, just not religious faith. I believe that things happen to us for a reason, that we are meant to cherish the joy we are given and meet life’s challenges with grace and courage. I believe our time on earth matters. I believe heaven is here and now. I believe, for better or worse, we live forever in the bits of ourselves we give to others as we travel our life paths.

I don't discount the possibility of God. But I believe if He/She/It exists, knowing the "logistics" of who He/She/Is it and how He/She/It works is beyond our human capabilities.

Having breast cancer, considering mortality as a result, hasn't changed what I believe at all--which, I guess, is the test of any faith, religious or otherwise.

In any case, I don’t need answers to those logistical questions anymore. I’ve learned that any question worth asking doesn’t have an answer, anyway.

Being Bald

On the bright side:

Great savings on hair care products.

No time wasted in beauty salons.

No bad hair days.

You can shock the shit out of people by simply taking off your hat—

Oh, wait. I’m too embarrassed to do that. The best I’ve done, in terms of public rebellion, is to wear a black head cover that has little white skulls all over it.

I really do hate being bald. Not in the house, alone—I’m quite used to it. In a weird way, I even think it’s kind of cool. But the way I look to others if they catch a glimpse of my bald head—

For example, not long ago, I was sitting at the dining room table, eating eating my breakfast, and I looked up and saw two 20’s-ish guys walking their dog. One looked up and I saw him see me and think: there is a bald woman eating breakfast in there.

I was embarrassed. I felt like I should run out and apologize for making him feel uncomfortable.

Which I realize is totally absurd.

Even more absurd. Some years back, when I was buzzing my own hair, I once forgot to put the attachment on. Standing in front of the mirror, I took the first swipe up the middle of my head with the shaver and—

Crap. I had a freaking reverse Mohawk. I stood there, horrified. Then (what else was there to do?) finished the job. I wasn’t completely bald, but close enough that I felt like I needed to wear a hat everywhere.

(“Hat! Hat!” my then two-year-old granddaughter, Heidi, said, alarmed, whenever I took it off.)

And even with the hat on, one day I was picking out fruit in the produce section at the grocery store and the woman standing next to me glanced over at me and asked, quietly, “Are you undergoing treatment?”

I should have said, yes; accepted her sympathy and, perhaps, commiseration, which she clearly wanted to give—then fled. But, no. I tried to explain what had happened. The more I talked, the stupider I felt.

She was the one who fled, no doubt thinking that it was bad enough to have cancer, but really pathetic to pretend you don’t.

I’d love to be the kind of person who said, “Fine. I’m bald. I’m just going to be bald. If people have a problem with that, so be it.”

I don’t actually know if I believed I would be that sort of person if the occasion arrived, but I’m guessing I did. Or at least hoped I would be. I know I’ve always admired women who have the courage to do it. But it turns out that I am not that kind of person.

I feel a little diminished by this piece of information about myself.

Meanwhile, my hair is growing. If I look in the mirror and squint, I can see a faint halo of hair on the sides and in the back. Not much on top, though—which is making me a little anxious. God. What if I end up with a permanent Bozo effect?

But that’s a whole other story.

All right, then. Moving On.

I had my final radiation treatment last Tuesday and left with a celebratory pink carnation and the well-wishes of the extraordinarily nice radiation technicians I’d gotten to know over the course of my month of daily visits.

“Congratulations!” they said.

Which seemed odd to me, since congratulations generally have to do with having accomplished something—and all I’d done was go where I was supposed to go and let nurses and technicians do what doctors had decided should be done to make me better.

And, honestly, it wasn’t all that bad. I don’t think having cancer will turn out to have been one of those before/after events for me. It didn’t feel like a challenge met, it didn’t change me or make me want to change my life in any way, it didn’t show me anything about myself that I didn’t already know. It was interesting, in an unpleasant way. It certainly made me think--which, in my view, is always a good thing.

For example, I used to think attitude made a huge difference. Now I think now it may make a difference: the chemistry of the body is changed by stress and fear and maybe it makes the body’s task easier if you don’t feel that.

But how you feel is how you feel.

You can defy feelings by acting against them. Or decide to act exactly how you feel. But either way, it's deciding how you're going to act despite or because of how you feel. Maybe negative feelings can shift in the process of acting against them, maybe not. If you're cheerful and optimistic by nature, lucky you. If not, you shouldn't be blamed for what you can't change. Being of the latter disposition, I've found that cultivating a matter-of-fact, Just Do It, attitude works best for just about everything that comes my way.

In any case, I feel like my body was the one challenged by this experience—and met the challenge very nicely. My body is what fought a battle and survived. Not me. If there is a story to tell about surviving, it’s my body’s story, not mine. My story is about hanging in there while it did its work. Giving up any idea that I could control what was happening to my body and how my body was responding to it. Being curious. Trying to learn what I could about the strange world of illness along the way.

I didn’t become one with my body, didn’t even have a moment of intuition of what that would be like. It’s still it and I’m still me. I feel grateful to my body for saving my self. This is probably a very weird way to be thinking about the experience.

But it explains why the language surrounding cancer just doesn’t work for me. Fighting and winning the battle against cancer. Cancer survivor. My body did that. It survived. Not me.
Not to mention the fact that a whole lot of people have it way, way worse than I did. I’m embarrassed when people use those terms talking about what I’ve gone through.

Plus, like faith, dealing with breast cancer feels private to me. Not that I’m unwilling to talk about it. (Anyone who knows me knows that, for better or worse, I’ll talk about anything.) Just that the experience itself belongs to me, alone. Only I can come close to understanding it. I don’t need or want a “church” of survivors to give it meaning. I don’t need or want “Pink.” (Though I very much respect those who gain strength from that community.)

Of course, you can’t have cancer without wondering if/when it will come back. And then what? But I’m trying not to go there.

Instead, I’m celebrating the fact that, at least for now, it’s over.

And working 24/7 on growing some hair.