I pulled out my wobbly bicycle and pumped up the tires! I rode around the neighborhood! Only a few blocks, but it was a matter of convincing myself I could do it. It was good for me, to feel myself headed down the street as always, nothing changed. Well, everything changed, but that’s beside the point. (Jerry took a real photo of me on my bike, but something's wrong between my Iphone photos and the computer. So this photo is a fake me.)
This is my week of theoretical reprieve before chemo next Tuesday, but I retain more of the bad effects than from previous chemos. Some days I could ride my bike a little if I had the mind to. Mostly not. One morning I’ll feel pretty good, but by afternoon, I feel tired and sick. I felt good Monday, but Monday night I had to take a nausea pill. Still, I am much better than when I wrote last week.
It helps me to do things the same as always. I look in the mirror in the mornings and I see a stranger with no hair, one who’s wearing glasses for now, at least. Glasses, I should mention, that are the wrong prescription since my eye surgery (and maybe the chemo), but it’s too soon to change them. After chemo’s all over, they tell me. My mind tells me I’m healthy as a horse, as I’ve always thought, and can do anything I want to. Then the fatigue sets in. I hit a wall. I pick a few weeds from the yard and have to sit in a lawn chair to recuperate. Still, in my mind, I’m fine, except for this cancer thing, which I’ve never seen and never felt. No wonder it’s hard to believe in. The treatments aren’t hard to believe in, however.
Every magazine I pick up in doctors’ offices—and that’s been a few—is concerned above all with self-image, which is basically what we think others think of us, right? Our image of ourselves reflected in the expressions of others. When really, it’s all us. All our own minds. Why do I not go around bare-headed bald? Because (A) it’s chilly; and (B) I prefer people to see me the way I’ve always looked. It helps me to see myself as the same person I thought I was, and maybe am, but for THIS. 
I like(d) the way I look(ed), pretty much. After an adolescence of glasses, pimples, and insecurity, I’ve felt okay about myself for years. How old do I feel? My mind thinks I might be about, oh, 45. How old do you feel? Maybe all of our ages are stored in us. Maybe we feel all ages at once.
The interesting thing is that NOTHING deters me from thinking of myself as younger and healthier than I am. Not that I push myself beyond what I can do. I quit when I’m tired. Some days I drag myself up these stairs to my study. Yet to my mind, this is no more than a temporary exhaustion as if I had stayed out too late partying and now am paying the price.
I work on poems with the same sense of Forever stretching in front of me as I did when I was 30. Actually, I think this is the only way we CAN work. No one writes good poems boxed in by time. Was it Levertov who said we need at least the “illusion” of a great expanse of time to work in, whether or not we really have it?
I imagine that the mind does this until it sees its end. I don’t know if this is true. I’’ve always wanted to ask a dying person, but never had the audacity to intrude. How does it feel, to know your life is almost over? Do you believe it, really? I suppose the answers would be as varied as the people I ask.
I feel unconcerned in an odd way with my own ending. Just as I feel unconcerned, oddly, with my illness. All evidence points to its reality. I know it must be true. But I have a sense of enduring this punishment of treatments like a child sent to her room, just waiting it out, knowing she’s innocent. Or knowing she’s being punished more than she deserves. Or, knowing the punishment has nothing to do with the crime. What do I disavow? My definition as a sick person, one who can’t ride a bicycle?
It seems deeper than that. It's doesn't feel like disavowing. There’s a sense, beyond fears, of ongoingness that can’t be shaken by the life/death issue. I’m not talking about conventional heaven or anything like that. A sense that I/we aren't separate from all that fluctuates. Fluctuate I will, and do. But something, which includes me, is ongoing in a very interesting way, and all I can do is stay tuned.