Of All the Luck

TRANSCRIPT OF THE TALK I GAVE AT THE SHE ROCKS OVARIAN CANCER FUNDRAISING EVENT—THE SHAMROCK SHINDIG—ON MARCH 18, 2023

First of all, happy Shamrock Shindig Night. St. Patrick’s Day my favorite holiday of the year, and not just because Guinness is Good for You. It’s because of the history of Ireland itself. The Irish were a nature loving people who have been invaded over and over again and who suffered great tragedy and who still manage to find their way out through song, dance, and laughs.

Like the Irish, cancer’s been around forever. THE AMERICAN CANCER SOCIETY says our oldest description of cancer was discovered in Egypt and dates back to about 3000 BC. It describes 8 cases of tumors that were removed by a tool called the fire drill. 

Which means, people being absolutely screwed by cancer have been around forever. And while I was not there, Im going to say with confidence that these people, like us, were not pleased.  They probably felt bewildered and enraged, scared and sad. Their children, spouses, parents were too. SUrely they, like us, begged for mercy, bargained for reprieve, and,tried  of every damn possible herb and healing and grifty health trend thing that came along. The people from before–they were just like us.

 Here’s the rough part. The 3000 b c Egyptian writing says, of  cancer, “There is no treatment.” 

That, thank goodness, is no longer true. There are now many treatments, with more coming along everyday. More people are living longer after or with the disease than ever before. That is so amazing and can we just take a minute to whoop and holler about that? Because hell yes. 

And no I'm not going to follow that up with any percentages because A) I am not a math person AT ALL 

and b) like Hans Solo says, when, in The Empire Strikes Back  C3PO informs him that the possibility of successfully navigating their ship through an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to 1: NEVER TELL ME THE ODDS.’ 

But that good news doesn’t mean, of course, that everyone survives. Lots of people receive this diagnosis and despite doing eveything that’s asked of them, don’t live very long at all. And you know what, let’s freaking whoop and holler for those people too, because they did a great job, and also deserve some noise.

So what does that all mean? 

It brings me to the symbol of this shindig, the shamrock. The Irish symbol of LUCK. Luck. An interesting word and an interesting idea. As anyone who has been touched by cancer in any way, the idea of luck can feel especially cruel.

The luck of the draw. That sinking feeling of why me, why my loved one, when cancer invades. 

Were those  of us who died from this disease quickly unlucky? I don’t love that, but I do definitely like it more than the other current that kind of runs under all discussion of disease and death in our western culture, that somehow it was their own fault,

Are those of us who are still here, JUST FOR TODAY, lucky? I don’t know. I feel lucky. Though at this point, lucky for all of it. Including the cancer. Which I kind of hate to even say, and I don’t blame you at all if you hate hearing me say it.

 Because is there anything worse than someone telling you you should be grateful for a hardship. That you should feel lucky for god’s sake? No. No there is not.  And I would never say to anyone that they should feel lucky. But I would say to people, and I do, in this book that I wrote, that being here on earth in a body and going through terrible things is just part of  —- it. A big, scary part of it. But an absolutely, apparently! essential part that is baked into the pie. Or the soda bread.I don’t know. I’m working with my Irish metaphors here, okay, just go with me. 

Here’s one thing cancer patients know. When you’ve been sick other people come to you and ask if you’ll talk to their person who’s just been diagnosed. They want someone to help their person. To give them the secret to survival, to help them understand how to just get through. They want to help. And they should. We should all help each other as much as possible. 

But what I realized pretty early on, and something that doesn’t get much acknowledgment, was that no matter how much help you’ve got, when you’re a cancer patient, or when you are grieving a loss, or a potential loss, you are, essentially, in a lot of ways alone.

Because you are the only one in your body. 

But that’s not a story we like very much. We avoid it. Like jazz hands, hallmark cards, 7 layer casseroles stacked 7 layers deep in the fridge level avoidance.

So, when my friend Jen, who Madison mentioned in the intro, asked me to share some wisdom with her, I looked her right in the face and said, LOOK LADY NOT ONLY DO YOU HAVE CANCER  YOU ARE ALSO ALL ALONE. No, just kidding. I didn’t do that. 

I tried to say it in a much more subtle, helpful way by framing it in a much bigger story.

Or two stories, really. Two myths about two different goddesses who went to the underworld that I had been teaching my college students about the very week I found out I had cancer. 

 One is Persephone. She’s the better known one, and you’ve probably heard of her. She’s the daughter of Demeter, who is the goddess of the harvest and agriculture. Anyway, she’s a beautiful young goddess who is out in the field picking flowers – the original Instagram influencer, just with a flowing gown and a flower crown and a twine wrapped bouquet when Hades, the God of the Underworld, takes a shine to her and, this is rough, and Hades should for sure be Me Too’d, should absolutely be canceled, drags her to the underworld. And refuses to let her go. 

And Demeter, well, Demeter shuts the whole bountiful, growing, above world DOWN. Harvest? F your harvest.  Flowers, trees, fruit? Nope. Not until she gets her daughter back. And because of this, Hades eventually relents, and agrees to return Persephone to the above world. But because Persephone ate three pomegranate seeds while she was down there–I mean, a girl gets hungry–Hades says she now partly belongs to the underworld, and will have to return for half the year. That, according to the myth, is how we got the seasons.

So that’s one. There’s a second myth, about a Sumerian goddess named Innana. but I’ll tell you about her as I tell you a bit about my own Underworld journey. Because this is a guide, and meant to be as helpful as possible, I will first offer you a map of where we’re going. Which is down. And then down. And then down some more. But then, I promise, back up. 

So, In ancient myth, the Underworld is two things. It’s the land of the dead. It’s where people go after they die. Usually on a boat, attended by a ferryman. 

If they go after death, they are there forever. Lost to the land of the living. 

But sometimes, some–like Persephone and Innana–go there during their lifetime, and come back. And that changes them forever. 

These journeys all start basically  the same way. A herald arrives to tell you've been called. In this case the herald was the obgyn who told me that based on an ultrasound I had because I thought I had fibroid tumors I probably had cancer, and then asked, way too quickly, if I was okay.

No. I said to her. No. I am not okay.

The next step is that someone arrives to carry you to the underworld. The ferryman. It’s not their fault that you have to go. They may even be very kind about having to take you there.
In my case this was a nurse at the oncologist’s office named Bridget. She held my hand as my doctor showed me the cancer inside me and told me the plan to cut it out and nuke my insides. 

I was so grateful to Nurse Bridget for holding my hand. I remember casting around wildly in my mind trying to come up with some way to get out of this. Someone to take my place. My worst enemy, maybe? No. There was no one else. It was me and me alone.

But for now, I had a steady, scrubs-clad woman who imparted to me through  the pulse of her hand that she believed, no matter what was about to happen, I could handle it. 

I won’t go through the absolute firehose of pain and anguish and that followed that day. Many of you are all too familiar. I will say this. It’s bad enough that you have to go through all of this stuff. It’stragically absurdly terrible that you often have to do it without any hair. BALD. Terribly unfair.

And that  was my second clue that  I really was being dragged the Underworld. Innana, because she was a Queen, and quite haughty, went to the Underworld beautifully dressed. An elegant hemp gown, a gorgeous lapis lazuli necklace. A crown. As she was shoved down, layer upon layer into the earth, she was stripped of all of these layers until she found herself at the bottom of everything in a dungeon, naked and afraid. And all alone.

For me, though there were many low points, the lowest came when I ended up in the hospital, my lung punctured from the surgery I had to put in a port.

When that happened I fell through the final trapdoor into an underworld dungeon even deeper and darker than the one I was already in. As much as I don’t want you to imagine me in any way other than you see me right now, with a fancy dress and fresh nail polish, I invite you to envision me as I was that night. Immobilized on a hospital bed. Hairless as a naked mole rat. Nauseated. Skeletal, probably going to die as far as I knew, and only able to take the shallowest sips of air. For 24 hours. But at least I also couldn’t sleep. 

Family sat around me during the day, watching, and clap if you know what this is–hospital TV. Mostly home renovation shows. Cooking contests. Just banal stuff that you can kind of, you know, handle.

But at night everyone went home. Before they left my husband to pull up a singer I know on youtube. It’s a type of classical Indian music called a raga. And the word itself means TO COLOR THE MIND.If you’ve never heard a raga, I highly suggest you give it a try. Im not a music person any more than I am a math person, so I won’t even try to explain what makes it so beautiful. I’ll just say it’s an extremely melodic kind of music that folds in and in on itself with a blend of beautiful stringed instruments like the sitar and and the most amazing kind of drum called a tabla which sounds to me like if you were a frog on a lily pad and could hear the amplified sound of a raindrop plopping onto the surface of lake, a flute, and, in this case, the sound of a woman’s voice. The woman is Kishori Amankar. And she has the kind of voice that sounds like the person who would introduce you to God when you got into heaven. 

 The song itself lasted about 12 minutes,and when it ended I would scoot my right index finger over and press the return key to make it play again. I did this over and over and over again. Same song. For a long time it felt like someone calling to me way above while I was stuck in a well. But slowly, it worked its way down to me. Eventually, I felt it kind of pierce the darkness of me. It poked a hole and kind of let this colorful light in. Hey, wait a minute–MAYBE IT CAME IN THROUGH MY PORT!
Anyway, it just swirled through me and transformed my body to an alone thing to a connected thing. Connected to something much bigger than myself and my own body, but also FULLY INCLUDING myself and my body.

At some point, on the slingshot that was the beauty of this music, I was flung out of the underworld, past the regular world, and into what I guess is its equal and opposite–the above world, from which perch it’s possible to look down and see everything as I imagine God, or Goddess, or the eternal consciousness or whatever you want to call it sees everything, which is that it’s all okay. Why? Not because everything is an even keeled sameness, but because it’s both the very worst and the very best.  

That feeling was fleeting. The morning came and the nurses and the fear and all of it returned me to the physical and emotional realities of my situation. But it was after that night–that I could feel myself slowly beginning to ascend. Not all the way back to the regular world all at once, of course, but sort of to the mezzanine. And then, eventually, back to this world. 

Now I want to be very very careful here. 

This story is not that bad things happen and you go through them and then everything is ok. Sometimes you go through bad things and everything is then not ok. 

There is no happy ending guaranteed in this life. Quite the contrary in fact. Everyone in this room is going to die. And everyone you love is going to die. And remember, this is the talk I am giving AFTER I heard from She Rocks that they want this event to be fun. But look. Doesn’t that, in fact, make it fun? The stakes are both very high and very low. 

Along every kind of journey, even the hardest ones, appear sweet and uncanny and surprising delights. There will be moments when music or art or nature or even an absurdly comic moment, pulls your soul right out of your body, shows you everything from outside of you, from above, and then plunks you, lovingly and rightly, back in to your body, with the knowledge that no matter what happens it’s all okay.  

Be always on the lookout for those moments, I say. They will, like fertilizer and water and sun, like music, help lift you back out of the underworld, help grow you like a flower out of the deep damp earth of below. 

When Persephone came back up, Spring returned. But she was not the same. Persephone had seen some things. She’d tasted POMEGRANATE, for lord’s sake. She was no longer a girl, she was a woman. 

Persephone, and her mom, and everyone else, even Hades who was forced into this half the year compromise, had learned to take the bitter with the better.

And Innana, she was changed. Her underworld journey showed her that finally had to admit that even though she was the Queen of the World, she was NOT the Queen of the Underworld. It chewed her up and spit her OUT. Her old clothes were now all covered in grime. They didn’t feel right for her anymore. She had to go out and get new clothes that suited the new Innana. Helped her be a more humble, more self-aware, wiser queen of the world. 

The world, which is a circle. A circle in which we all, together, reside. And one which, despite the individual nature of our solitudes and our sorrows, will, like a raga, become more transformatively harmonious if we help one another in every way we can. If we create a circle with hearts coming out in all directions. One that looks like I don’t know, a shamrock. Each leaf a front and a back, dark green, light green, good bad, turning and turning like a pinwheel, catching the glint of the sun. And we are here, right now, this very day, getting to experience it. Can you believe the luck?