April 10th, snow again, dark and heavy skies. I feel the long stretch of all this. In spite of my miraculous, sensitive oncologists, the angelic nurses and staff—still, it’s my body and I’m tired. And weary, which is different. They said the five weeks of radiation would be easier than chemo, but when all those rays landed squarely on my (delicate) digestive system, I ended up needing to take a cocktail of drugs to keep me from feeling sick all the time. I’m still taking them. Dare I post this picture of how I really feel?
Now I’m having the “internal” radiation once a week, targeted at internal scar tissue where cancer cells might lurk. No problem, they said: this time we’re hitting below your stomach. Shouldn’t bother you. Maybe it hasn’t. Maybe my extreme fatigue is accumulated from the total radiation. I spent last Saturday and Sunday lying on the sofa sleeping, reading a bit, and sleeping some more. The measure of my fatigue is whether or not I can make myself get on the treadmill for a mere 20 minutes. Some days not.
The word “bravery” has always annoyed me when it comes to major illness. After all, you get sick, you do what you have to do. You take the pills, you get the treatments. Bravery has nothing to do with it. Bravery is when you face something you’re scared of, in hopes of making things better. You fight dragons, you rescue a child from an oncoming truck, you give a speech in front of thousands.
I should have recognized this other kind of bravery: you drag yourself out of bed even when you feel like warmed-over frozen pizza, and you put on makeup and you coordinate your chemo hat with your outfit even when you’re going to be at your desk all day. You get your work done, if slowly. If you have no poems coming, you read and make notes. You read. The main thing is, after months of this, it does seem to take bravery to stay in the world.
Maybe that’s not specifically bravery, since the will to live is pretty potent, and until our bodies tell us otherwise, we fight tooth and nail to stay in the world. Still, the Sisyphean dailyness of this fatigue seems to extract a kind of bravery.
There’s the launch party at the library on Friday for Growing Old In Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives. I was feeling better when I set this all up, but the party lasts only two hours, and I’m looking forward to it. Since it’s an e-book, we’re calling it “Books in Space.” We’ll have my co-author Sydney Lea on YouTube, the editor of Autumn House Press, Michael Simms, on Skype, the library staff will be there to help people download the book, and we may even be on local TV. The e-book will be available for loan soon, also. You can order it now on Kindle, $9.99. You won’t be sorry.
So what about these e-books? How dare we undermine our precious independent bookstores, that I value so dearly? I’m thinking fear is not the way we’ll move in
to this brave new world. Did DVDs wreck the movie business? A lot of us are buying real books and will continue to. I’m reading four actual, paper books at present: Syd’s new collection of poetry: I Was Thinking of Beauty; Albert 
Goldbarth’s older collection of poems, Saving Lives; my former student Erin Coughlin Hollowell’s first collection of poems, Pause, Traveler; Kent Haruf,’s 
Benediction (all his books are made of solid earth and will save your jaded soul)—and then I’m also reading Barrie Jean Borich’s Body Geographic 
on my IPad (If you love Chicago, read this book). Jerry and I pass books and the Kindle and the IPad back and forth. I prefer books. I do. But in bed, and traveling, it’s easier to hold the IPad open, and it stores a lot of books.
This was about fatigue, wasn’t it? It was easy to segue to books, since when there’s no energy at present to shape this life, the one lying here on the couch, there’s always another life, another person’s telling, to see into. What’s “real”? The poems are real, the fabricated tales are as real as those we think aren’t fabricated. None “true,” all “true.” We see into and through lives, we stretch our perceptions. Non-fiction, fiction, poems: all ways of seeing. The accumulation is a kind of energy of its own.