Rocking the Pink (22 page)

When I wrote my song “Float Away,” I was six months shy of my cancer diagnosis. Cancer was still someone else's sad misfortune, something that would never happen to me. In fact, I had never faced a defining hardship in my own life, though, of course, I had experienced personal heartaches and disappointments. “Float Away” was what came out of me when I allowed myself to feel others' struggles vicariously.

Way back when Brad and I were teenagers, we were driving south toward Mexico, intent on reveling in a carefree day of surfing (Brad), sunbathing (me), and lobster, when we spotted a young woman clinging to the
outside
of a chain-link fence on a freeway overpass, just before the Mexican border.

The girl was perched on a three-inch-wide strip of cement, clutching the chain-link fence at her back and looking down at the rushing cars twenty feet below. There was no question in our minds what she was doing out there on that precarious ledge, her skirt billowing above the speeding traffic below.

“Pull up onto that overpass, right next to that girl,” I ordered Brad, and he did, holding his breath in anticipation.

I had never been trained in crisis management, and I didn't know the recommended protocol in such a situation. But what I did know was this:
I was pissed.

Wordlessly, I stomped out of the car, slamming the door behind me, and marched directly toward that shivering girl.

The roar of the passing traffic below us forced me to shout, even though we were standing mere feet apart. “Hey!” I called out in a stern voice. “You there!”

She turned to look at me with wide brown eyes.

Oh, she's younger than I'd thought.
She was about my age.

“Get down from there and come over here this instant!” My tone was indignant. “
Right now!”

But she didn't budge. She just stared at me for a few seconds and then turned her dull gaze back to the freeway.

I was miffed.
How dare she!

“You know, you're not allowed to be there!”

Still no reaction.

I inched closer to the girl, until I was standing about a foot away from her, just behind her right shoulder, on the safe side of the chain-link fence. She didn't react to my advancement, but instead maintained her blank stare at the onrushing traffic.

“Do you speak English?” My tone was not gentle; it was bossy. Still no response. “
¡Ven acá este minuto! ¡Está prohibido!”
I shouted with authority, showing off my many years of Spanish-language studies.

Without acknowledging me, the girl with the big brown eyes tilted her gaze to her right, toward the end of the chain-link fence, twenty yards away, and then slowly began to inch her way across the length of the fence, back toward the safety of the overpass. She finally arrived at the open edge of the fence and stepped gingerly onto the sidewalk. For just a moment, she stood about a foot from me, both of us now on the safe side of the fence, and our eyes met.

How could you even think of doing such a horrible thing?
And then I felt my heart soften.
Why do you feel so hopeless?

Her big brown eyes flashed at me one last time, and then she ran away without a word.

I stood rooted to my spot on the sidewalk, as a loud semitruck rattled past me on the freeway below.

I climbed back into the car, where Brad had watched this drama unfold from the driver's seat.

“What did you say to her? That was crazy!” he exclaimed, but I was too stunned to respond.

He didn't push me for a response. Instead, he silently started the car and pulled back onto the road, shaking his head in disbelief. I looked out the car window, lost in my thoughts as our car merged into traffic again. She was nowhere to be seen.

I pulled down the visor mirror above my car seat and gazed at my own brown eyes. But all I could see were that girl's haunting brown eyes staring back at me.

It was then, and only then, that I thought to myself,
Holy crap.

Throughout the twenty years after that day, I thought about the girl with the empty brown eyes many times. Had she returned to the bridge to complete her mission five minutes after we'd left? Or maybe the next day? There was no shortage of freeway overpasses in the world. Or had she gone straight home to swallow a bottle of pills?

I had somehow managed to shame her off that bridge that day, but I'd done nothing to give her hope, to change her heart. I had merely distracted her for a brief moment, like swatting at a fly buzzing around a picnic feast.

As time went by, I realized the girl on the overpass was not alone, that occasional strangers were drowning in despair and longing all around me. A passing glance from a stranger entering the bank jolted me with a sudden, but palpable, flash of sadness. At the park, when I
witnessed a mother pushing her young child on a swing, I could
feel
her hopelessness as surely as if she'd whispered, “Help me” into my ear. As surely as if she'd been standing on a freeway overpass.

And each time a stranger's hopelessness whispered to me, the idea blossomed inside me just a little bit more: I wanted to give them hope. I wanted to make a lasting impact.

When “Float Away” started to make its way around the world through the magic of radio and the Internet, I began receiving emails and cards from people who had heard the song. One woman wrote to tell me she had just lost her young husband in a tragic boating accident. “I am struggling to carry on,” she said, “for the sake of my three young boys.” Someone had played “Float Away” in her young-widows support group, she wrote, telling the group, “You have to listen to this song.” After that first day, she had listened to the song fifty times in a row, she wrote in her email, and it had helped her get through each day.

Another woman wrote to tell me that every day, she had stolen away from her family to drown her sorrows in a bottle of wine. “No one knows my secret,” she wrote to me, “but your song is giving me the strength to seek treatment.”

A man wrote that his girlfriend was battling cancer and he had been playing the song for her every day throughout her treatments. “Your song gives her strength to get through the worst days,” he wrote. “Thank you.”

Back when I received these beautiful notes, only a few months before my own life was torpedoed by the unthinkable, I was deeply moved, of course, but I was not one of those people. I read Brad every
email and note, my voice cracking and catching with each word, but I stood safely on my side of the chain-link fence.

I can help others through my music,
I thought. Surely this was my higher purpose. Why me, I didn't know, when I hadn't suffered a catastrophic setback in my own life, but it felt right, like the fulfillment of some lifelong potential.

It did not occur to me then that in the coming months, I would cling desperately to hope in my own life, too. No, I thought, I would be the purveyor of inspiration for others, through my music; but in my own life, I would hopscotch across the clouds as I'd always done. Because, you know, bad things never happened to me.

But, oh, how life can turn on a dime with just one phone call! One little phone call from that damned surgeon, and I had been ripped from the safety of the sidewalk and pushed onto a concrete ledge overlooking an overpass. I had become
one of them,
one of
those other types of people.
Pitiable. Pitiful.

And now, having reached my fourth chemo infusion, the half way mark in my arduous chemotherapy regimen, a milestone I'd thought would be cause for celebration and high-fiving, I felt nothing but despair. I wasn't fist-pumping the air at reaching the halfway mark. No, I was decrying the interminable second half yawning before me.

The glass was half empty.

At night, I had started to have recurring dreams in which my girls were in some form of peril—Chloe falling off a towering ledge, Sophie being swept out to sea. And in each dream, there I stood, mere inches away from my endangered child—powerless, ineffectual,
reaching, reaching, screaming, crying. Impotent. Each morning when I awoke, my heart felt bruised from the previous night's battering.

The glimmering memory of my prior self, my vital and powerful self, was becoming faded and cracked. I was beginning to feel . . . hopeless.

After coming home from my fourth chemo infusion, the halfway point of a grueling marathon, a milestone I'd expected would elicit excitement and a sense of accomplishment, I stood in the shower, letting the hot water pound my scrawny back, and I cried deep, heaving sobs.

I could give up,
I thought suddenly.
I have the power to make it all go away.

This was a novel thought. I had the power to make the pain and dreariness go away!

This wasn't a movie. This was real life. And it sucked. Hard. And I wanted out.

It was my prerogative to end it all! All I had to do was stop fighting! Why had I been fighting so hard—not just now, against cancer, but all my life? I'd always been so fierce, so focused, so accomplished. Never a quitter! Never half-assed! And where had it gotten me? Here. To
this.
What was the point in any of it? Why keep fighting? What was the big whoop about survival, anyway? Easy come, easy go.

An entire lifetime of pushing, and pressing, and proving—swinging my machete through dense jungles of my own making (à la Michael Douglas in
Romancing the Stone)—
and I suddenly recognized my own power: I could simply let go, and . . . fade away.

The path of least resistance. I'd never taken that path before. It sounded . . . relaxing. Like a steam bath.

I drew a frowny face in the steam on the shower door.

Poor me.

What was happening to me? This was so unlike me!

The hot shower water beat down on me, mixing with the tears streaming down my face.

“Hold on, for one more day . . . ” I sang in the shower, my voice almost inaudible. “Hold on for one more day.” I sang more loudly. “Hold on for one more day! Hold on for one more day!” It was a battle cry.

I waited. Wasn't this song—
my song—
supposed to summon the angels straight down from heaven? Wasn't this song—this beacon of light and hope—supposed to lift me out of my darkest moment? Wasn't this song supposed to
inspire
me?

I waited.

“Hold on for one more day,” I said flatly, this time in a speaking voice.

When Dr. Hampshire entered the examination room, he could plainly see I was on the verge of crying. It was unlike me. I was his upbeat, positive patient. His role model for other patients. A force of nature! A limitless well of strength. Not a beaten-down, can't-get-my-ass-up-again quitter.

“What's up?” he asked.

“It feels like such a long road,” I whimpered, the wax paper crinkling beneath me on the examination table. “I can't see the end.” My voice was breaking. “I'm starting to . . . ” I couldn't bear to finish the sentence.
Give up.

Dr. Hampshire looked me in the eye. He knew.

“Laura,” he said firmly, “you are the strongest person I know. Do you hear me? You can do this.”

“But . . . ” I began, intending to let him in on my secret. I was not strong. I was a quitter. I was a big fat quitter!

“All you have to do is keep showing up, Laura, and I'll do the rest,” Dr. Hampshire continued. He got up from his desk chair and stood beside the examination table. He touched my forearm. “Laura, the road is already shorter than it was yesterday. Every single day, you are one step closer to being finished. And when you are finished, you will be cured, and you will never look back. You will live a full life; you will raise your daughters.” And then, with an intensity befitting the skilled down-from-the-ledge talker he was, Dr. Hampshire added, with absolute medical authority, “And—you—will—be—famous.”