It’s that age.  Sandwiched between aging parents and children coming of age, we find ourselves cramped between a rock and a hard place – breathing, sometimes panting, often gasping.  On the one hand a daily reminder of death drawing near and on the other, life bursting onto the world stage.  Friendships are solidified, careers defined, marriages established or limping along, assets building up sometimes nicely and frequently disappearing as soon as they are acquired and an earth suit that while not ready to be put to rest, is beginning to show signs of wear.  Droopy eyelids, thickening ankles, a twinge in that left knee after the rain, rich meals followed by heart burn,  spirits dipping more often than before.  Some of us rush to erase time from our faces, pop pills and drown ourselves in minutiae.  Botox sessions, fillers, nips and tucks – we line the pockets of surgeons who are only too glad to maintain the illusion of youth, a youth which the media insists has not passed us by, handing us slogans we gullibly gobble up.  But the mirror can lie only so much.  And in time we accept the truth and find peace in ourselves – that sweet spot of caring without caring.  We consider it life’s most beautiful plateau. A pleasant vista offering us the landscape of a past we are still able to recall, often in great detail, a present that has become all the more valued and a future we are apt to draw as a trajectory of the lifestyle we are proud to have lived.

And then the phone call comes.  The next stop on the train ride of time. 

Stage 3 she says, one lump the size of a crushed golf ball, she cries, and a couple in the lymph nodes too.  So it’s travelled but not too far.  Instantly I feel a sting, a sharp and piercing ache in my left nipple. It travels to the core all the way to the chest muscle, the one where she is telling me her lump is.  It’s been there, she says, they think, for about 5 years.  I am desperate to ask about her mammograms of the past 5 years but suppress the urge.  As if she has heard my inner thoughts, she fills in that she never had those because she didn’t believe in them. She thought they would do more harm than good. That all this testing was a government conspiracy, a ploy, a make rich quick scheme by the manufacturer of the machines.  What would they tell you anyway, she consoles herself aloud.  Half the time they are wrong.  She is an artist.  A believer in telling of fortunes and destiny.  She has bought into the myth of clean living making for a healthy body, conveniently forgetting the undeniable role of randomness of life and genetics.   So the wheel of misfortune has turned and her number has been called and she is puzzled for she is convinced she was exempt from this deadliest of games by the mere fact of being a good girl, eating her veggies and her 8 glasses of water, doing yoga three times a week, brushing her teeth and turning in every night, religiously for her 8 hours of rest.  Surely that lifestyle needed to be rewarded and not with a crushed golf ball which has now sent its satellite cousins on a spree to the rest of her body with a pit stop at her armpits.

A team of doctors descends upon her. UCLA top specialists she tells me.  Promptly she is pumped with poison administered with discipline every 21 days.  Denial takes her through the first session. Oh – she is doing great she says when asked how it is going.  It is a blast. The nurses are great and I get to take my teddy bear and bag of munchies.  At 46 she is comforted with the treats fit for a 6 year old.  She is going to have a new body by September complete with a pert chest and a flat stomach she assures me. They are going to take fat from my middle and make breasts for me, she educates.  I get to choose how big and finally I will get that cleavage I always coveted.  I get to choose the color of my nipple. I have found a great tattoo artist.  I listen. I listen carefully and wonder to myself – what about those nasties in the lymph nodes. Will they travel and if so how quickly?  I pore over the net to find out about Stage 3. I find it divides into a series of scenarios, categorized by an alphabet soup. 5-year survival rate of 49% after mastectomy, chemo and radiation.  What does that really mean?  A definite maybe. It means nothing.  Statistics.  It is simply an analysis of what has happened in the past and just like the warning at the bottom of the page listing the earnings of my retirement fund – the one I would be lucky enough to draw upon when – no IF – I make it to the magical age of 65, it cautions – ‘numbers are based on past performances and no indication of future’. 

She holds a wig party. She greets me at the door with an enormous blond Afro, big sunglasses and a flowy dress - an attempt to give her volume, to conceal the skeleton beneath. She has lost 30 lbs. in two months she whispers to me breathlessly.  Nothing sticks any more, she gloats.  I note her cleavage – for the first time, prominent and bold, bursting out of what I am sure is a high-end push up bra.  I offer her my favorite hat, the navy wool one with a star on its left lip. The one I wear on cold winter days in the mountains.  I have washed and dried it, yet when she puts it to her nose she tells me she can smell my scent – the sweaty sweetness of perspiration which has permeated into the knots, a place no detergent can remove.  She takes it personally – an offering of a body part – a body secretion at least - it’s a part of me, she says.  I weep inside.  And outwardly I tousle her Afro and tell her she makes a shitty blonde. To which she says she can’t stop shitting.  She shits so much that her brain seems to be draining through her anus. She has a way with words.  I carry the Persian spread I have cooked up to her kitchen counter and watch her devour it. Ghormeh Sabzi and Tahdig. Her favorites.  She is eating like a maniac, stuffing her mouth one heaping spoon after another. Food. Life. Food.  Bliss.  Food. Solace.  Food. Escape.  Food. Food. Food.  She smiles.  I’m dying she whispers. Do you know – I am dying.  I search desperately in my mind for something to say. Nothing. I come up with nothing but the honest truth not offered as condescending sympathy or empathy, for which I am not equipped but factually – just like I see it.  We are all dying, I finally respond holding her gaze.   Dead on arrival.  For a time in between our first cry as we exit the womb to the time we return to earth it’s a respite from non-existence.  We matter to nobody before we get here and we matter less when we leave.  Maybe for a brief time somebody will think of us. Our children perhaps, and if we are lucky, our grandchildren. Barring those famous people who in the end are only known more for what they left behind than for who they were, we matter naught.  And our number is called out of nowhere, with no correlation to how we choose to live.  Those who get to stay when we leave theorize and reason that we left because of this or that.  Secretly we are all deluding ourselves.  A self defense mechanism presumably built within our genes to stop us from killing ourselves.  Yes – we are all dying. 

Morbid thoughts. Yet I feel so alive.  Sad, but still living and wanting to.  I am too old now to care what I would leave behind.  I am old enough now to be selfish.  I am old enough to know that I can do nothing but be here and live my life a day at a time.  I am old enough now to realize that I don’t want my face injected with poison only to have a clear forehead at the expense of Mr. Spock eyebrows.  It’s the story of my life – right there on my face and I don’t ever want to erase it.  I am old enough that the only thing I can do is feed the birds and water my plants.

That night, before bedtime, I stare at that face and then the body – the upper half. I check my breasts, one at a time, with care.  Clockwise I run my middle and index fingers in circular motion from the center to the outer perimeter – slowly. I close my eyes and then I open them to look for the slightest asymmetry in the mirror. Once these glands stood boldly against gravity and filled bikini tops and lacy underwear and, in turn were cherished by onlookers and caressed by lovers. Lovingly they expanded with milk and offered nourishment to the infant.  Faithfully they shrank back afterwards and dutifully they followed me to the clinic each year where they were pressed painfully in between two slabs of Perspex for a picture.  Woefully with the passage of time, they started to descend, one micrometer after another - equally on both sides - as if they had a pact never to leave one another behind in their race to reach my belly button by the time I turn 80 – when – NO  - IF I make it there.  I caress them kindly and thank them. I thank my body and my lucky stars that I get to keep them still.  I place my head on my pillow and selfishly I whisper a plea to the randomness around  – Let it not be me.  Let it not.