Eating the Underworld (27 page)

It's over! I've finished my last chemo! I've gone through all the chemo sessions in three-week intervals—the fastest you can do them. It feels like doing a hat-trick or winning a trifecta! I'm really excited. I'm also
incredibly tired; even walking the few metres to the carpark feels like a marathon; but it's over! In a month, I get a Ca125 and a CT scan done and then make an appointment to see Jim and Greg. I'm back on track!

It felt so good to know that this was the last time I'd be packing my little bag for hospital. Each chemo session involves an overnight stay and by now I have the routine down pat. I drink my four litres of water on the day before chemo and again on the day itself. I come in laden with water bottles, my tape-recorder, magazines and a small electric heating pad—encouragement for my veins. I also take a megadose of Senna in the afternoon, to head off constipation. I'm a traveller who's finally figured out what to pack.

It was my birthday on the day before chemo. Celia took me out to an art exhibition for a birthday treat, with dinner at a Japanese restaurant in the evening. The dinner turned out to be a surprise party that she had arranged. My first ever. It was great. A bunch of friends was there and it was a real celebration.

Celia and I have been friends for twenty-plus years after bonding at a kindergarten mothers' ice-breaker. She's been terrific. Every three weeks during my chemo months, she's swooped by and carried me off to the pictures or for an outing. We go on weeknights when there aren't many people (I've been told to avoid crowds) and I feel like a pampered, delicate child, taken out for holiday treats.

It's a couple of days after chemo and I'm still astonishingly fatigued. After I brush my teeth in the morning, I have to sit down to recuperate. It's strange
being so physically weak. I get up in the morning thinking I'm made out of hardwood, but within two minutes discover that I'm actually tissue paper.

It's a week now since chemo and I'm still amazed by the level of exhaustion. Jim says that because I've been going through so fast, my body will be even more depleted than usual and that I'll be more tired and take more time to recover than someone who's gone through at a slower pace. But it's wonderful to know it's all over. I thought I'd feel exhilarated, but I'm actually too tired to do exhilaration. I do, however, have enough energy for very, very relieved.

I used to think I knew what ‘tired' was. When one of my American publishers sent me on a sixteen-cities-in-three-weeks publicity tour with a different time-zone every day and an optimistic four hours' sleep a night, I thought that was ‘tired'. On the last day of the tour, they outdid themselves and had me in three cities on the same day. I took the train from Philadelphia to my last stop, New York, dragged my luggage and myself halfway up the stairs of the station and felt my legs go. As I dropped to my knees on the steps of Penn. Station, I realised that was it—I just couldn't get up. And that was where my publicist found me, half an hour later, when she came to investigate my absence—on my knees, on the steps of Penn. Station, resigned to staying there forever. I thought that was ‘tired'. It wasn't.

It's three weeks after chemo now. I read somewhere that cranberries have a unique test for freshness. You throw them on the floor. If they bounce back, they're
fresh and ready to eat. If they just lie there, they're bruised or rotten. Well, I've failed the cranberry test.

This last fortnight has been terrible. So many things have gone wrong, one after another. Nothing on the cancer front, but in almost every other direction, unexpected obstacles and disasters have been flying at me. I've been trying to mop up the mess, but my energy is failing and I'm so frustrated and tired that I feel like a weepy heap. I feel as if I've climbed a really high and difficult mountain and that when I finally reached the top, instead of a rest, there was someone waiting with a hammer to hit me over the head. If I had the energy, I'd scream. All I can manage right now is an anguished squeak.

To try to fix one of the problems, I've had to ring an acquaintance for whom I did a huge and life-altering favour a couple of years ago. I was happy to do it at the time, with no thought of repayment. Now I need to ask for a small favour, which would take a minute of their time. I loathe asking people for favours; I never do it. But this time, I have no choice.

I phone and to my amazement my request is blandly refused. I'm almost speechless with shock. It brings me right back to the first days of my recurrence and the experience I had with those friends who abandoned me. The universe is clearly shaking its head, inspecting its nails in a bored fashion and muttering, ‘Slow learner. Slow learner.'

And I have been. It's a class I never wanted to take; have had to be dragged to. ‘Too trusting' is the label my friends have always given to me. I've worked in
departments with politics hotter than Vesuvius and haven't been bothered by them, simply because I haven't noticed them. I've been insulted and smiled amiably at the insulter, not recognising what has happened, because it just hasn't occurred to me that someone would be that nasty. (This response, incidentally, comes highly recommended as a sure-fire method of driving the offender batty.)

Like a lot of people in the ‘helping professions', I've always taken care of people. I've done it ever since I was a child, when my school friends told me their troubles and the stray dogs in the neighbourhood followed me home. Although it wasn't my stated vocation back then, the inscription from my classmates in my seventh grade year-book reads, ‘To Doris, the Psychiatrist.'

Being the rescuer has been a role I've fallen into easily. In part, because I am good at rescuing. Also because I am not good at asking for things for myself. It is the persistent echo of that old self who needed to be good and take care of people in order to be worthy of a place in the world.

In many ways I have left her far behind. I have grown up to be a strong and resilient adult. From the sixteen-year-old who froze when put into a situation containing more than one person, I have become someone who can effortlessly address an audience of hundreds without the slightest flicker of nerves. I have dared things and succeeded, led a rich and productive life. So why is she dogging me now?

And I begin to realise that regardless of how much
I have changed, it is still easier for me to give than to ask; that in fact I have been giving myself away like water. To some good people, to be sure—my family, my true friends—but also to people who have been too needy or too self-centred to enter into a truly reciprocal relationship. I have been giving myself without discrimination, and somewhere inside me, there is still the shy young girl who is too frightened to ask.

I have to think about this. About what I am doing. About where generosity becomes neurosis. About what one is denying when one is too ‘trusting'. I have to recognise the shadow-side of ‘niceness'. The excessive need to be ‘obliging', ‘responsible', ‘reasonable'. The avoidance of realities, both in the world and in oneself. And the cost one can be forced to pay.

Where did I learn to shrink from asking of others? Where did I learn to put so little value on myself that the words ‘Temerity!' ‘Imposition!' jump up like jailors at the thought? I was brought up in a family where children were pampered, spoiled. Surely I should have felt entitled in the outside world? Surely I should have learned to ask for things?

And then I remember my mother, who never put herself first. She too felt ‘disentitled' when it came to our needs versus hers. I think of my father as a boy, giving lollies to his schoolmates to ensure their friendship. My relationship with my sister. And I see where I have come from. But I also see that where I am is
now
. This is my responsibility. My work that needs to be attended to. My shadow demanding to be claimed.

And I think about how hard it is to really claim our shadows; how much easier to avoid, deny or blame. I remember the moment in
Peter Pan
that always made me gasp. It wasn't the ticking crocodile or Captain Hook. It was the moment when, having lost his shadow, Peter comes back to the Darling household to reclaim it.

He has retrieved his shadow from the drawer in which it was stowed and is trying to stick it back on. At first Peter thinks that when he and his shadow are simply brought close to each other again they will join, like drops of water. But that doesn't happen. Next he tries to glue his shadow to him with wet soap. But that fails too. Distraught, Peter sits crying on the floor. His shadow won't stick and even Peter knows that he needs his shadow to be complete.

Peter's crying wakes up Wendy. And practical Wendy knows just what to do. There is only one way to make sure it stays on. ‘It must be sewn on,' she says. And this is where I shudder. Because unlike Peter, Wendy and I know that sewing will hurt.

It's a fantasy of many of us that one day it won't hurt. It won't hurt because after years of life, learning, therapy, love, wisdom (tick the favoured box), we will be complete, whole, perfect. There will be no more sewing to do.

And I am taken back suddenly to an occasion more than twenty years ago. I am overseas at a conference; the first international conference I have attended by myself. I was expecting it to be a smallish conference. Instead, as I enter the foyer and convention rooms, I realise that instead of a few hundred people, there are
a few thousand people. And they all seem to know one another.

I wander around the rooms looking in vain for a familiar face. Everyone else is busy greeting friends and colleagues; at ease, relaxed, confident. The workshop I have chosen begins. I am seated in a room of six hundred strangers. And suddenly all I can think about is that I'll have to sit by myself at lunch-time. I am twenty-nine—self-assured and successful—and I can feel myself shrinking at the rate of knots. All the way back down to that shy teenager who would rather not have lunch than face the cafeteria all by herself.

I am horrified. I thought I was over all this. Haven't felt like this for over a decade. But ‘horrified' doesn't make it go away. It's ridiculous, I tell myself. Telling myself makes no difference either. All the old feelings, the old words are starting to swallow me up—
ugly, useless, clumsy
… I know they will engulf me if I let them. ‘I'm twenty-nine,' I tell myself. ‘I can do something different.' But most of me doesn't believe it.

So I make a pact with myself. A challenge. If I succeed in it, I'll win. I can be twenty-nine again. If I don't … Well, I'll think about that later.

The challenge is the most difficult one I can think of. I am to look around that room of six hundred strangers, pick out the best-looking man, and get him to invite me to have lunch with him.

The challenge appals me. I could never do that. At least let me pick a nerdy-looking guy, one who might welcome an extra lunch companion. But no, I am resolute. A challenge has to be tough or it isn't
a challenge. I have to earn being twenty-nine.

I look around the room carefully. I am going to be scrupulously honest about this. The best-looking man in the room is a clear stand-out, sitting several rows ahead of me. He is, of course, surrounded by several exceptionally beautiful women. They lean over regularly to whisper in his ear.

Because he is sitting in the section ahead of me, I can't even make eye contact during the two hours of workshop. All I will have is a thirty-second window of opportunity as he passes me in the aisle on the way out to lunch. It's all going to depend on that. Impossible. For me, at any rate.

How I succeeded in that, I still don't know. I've never done anything like it before or since. He, I and the glamorous women companions all went out and had lunch together. And then nothing bothered me again throughout the whole conference. I was invincible. Occasionally I would notice the good-looking man, at a seminar or other conference event. He would always run up to talk to me, looking faintly puzzled. He asked me to lunch on several other occasions. I politely refused. All I had needed was the one.

Why did I do that? It wasn't about needing a man or being a flirt. It was essentially about making a choice; about regressing or finding my own power. It wasn't the only challenge I could have picked, but it was the one that felt most frightening. It was the one about inviting myself into the limelight: ‘Notice me. I'm worth noticing.'

We all meet our frailties, our fears, the deepest, most
detested aspects of ourselves over and over again. We think we have them licked. They sneak up from the sidelines. And always, of course, they do it when we are at our weakest, our most vulnerable, our most desperate. Will we never be rid of them, we think? Surely we've ditched them by now? But the answer comes: no, we haven't. Because they are part of us, as much a part of ourselves as the aspects we admire. They are our shadow and like Peter Pan, we need them in order to be whole. What we can hope for, perhaps, is that we get a little better at sewing.