Pocket Change: Under the Light of the Moon

Last night, at a beautiful event curated by artist Alyssa Smith, I read my essay "Under the Light of the Moon." I drove home while August's rare blue supermoon rose above the hills.

Sometime in the middle of June last year, I stopped looking in mirrors. 

I had started to lose my hair several weeks earlier after my first few chemotherapy treatments. First, I noticed it clumped in my hairbrush. A few days later it lay, oily and lifeless and left behind on my pillowcase in the morning when I woke up. In May, my husband Craig, stood behind me while I sat in a creaky chair in our bathroom. I watched in the mirror as he tenderly shaved my head, and what remained of my straight, wheat-colored hair fell to the white tiles below. 

Though continually horrified by the physical reminder of what was happening to me, as the months went on I grew more accustomed to the shape of my naked head and the place on my face where my eyebrows used to be. Being hairless was simultaneously the most monumental and the most inconsequential fact about my life.

I had suddenly been confronted with a breakneck pace of medical appointments, weekly infusions, shots to boost my dwindling white blood cells; a litany of side effects that sounded like a pharmaceutical company’s late night advertising; a new lexicon of forboding onomatopoeic words that described my aggressive disease, and the medicines that would try to rid my body of it –  paclitaxol, carboplatin, neupogen. And, of course, the haunting knowledge of cancer cells attempting to multiply in my body.

That is to say, there were bigger fish to fry then my hair problem. And yet, I mourned it and the pre-cancer person that went with it. Without my hair I was exposed. There was no hiding from what was happening.

In those months, in the few moments that I felt well enough to venture out on my own to do an errand, pick up my kids from school, or see friends, I tried not to glance at my eyes in the rearview mirror. If I did look, I did not see them, but rather looked through them. There, on the rectangular reflector six inches to the right of my head, was an image of the eyes I knew, but behind the image there was nothing of the self I had recognized just weeks earlier.

When I dressed in the morning, I looked in the mirror, but instead of a feeling of familiar perception, I felt as if I had been split in two. There was a body standing there, a woman with the same eyes looking back in my direction. But I was sure I was not still in it. I didn’t see even a remnant of the woman I knew to be me – the person I knew I was on the inside. 

Eventually I began dressing in the dark closet in our bedroom, where there was nary a mirror in sight. The act of not looking at myself seemed to fit perfectly in the upside down logic of the nightmare scenario unfolding. Every glance in the mirror meant visual evidence of the disease now inhabiting my body.

You, the woman in the mirror said to me.

Yeah, you– the one looking back at me with the same hands, the same scar on your forehead and the same freckle under your left eye. You are a cancer patient now.

My relationship with myself and my physical body was growing obscured, distanced and dislocated with every passing week. The experience of estrangement from myself was so vivid, so omnipresent, I felt as if I might entirely float away. Sometimes I found myself searching for my own shadow.

If it was there, I’d think to myself, ok then I must still be here. Here. With cells and molecules, and specific DNA, forming a solid physical human shape, carrying around the soul of a person that used to know herself. A person who once embodied herself, her body, her life. 

The recognition of a shadow was comforting and alarming. 

I used to know how to locate myself, I thought. Or, at least, I used to be in a position to try. 

In the many months spanning treatment I often thought about a trip our family had taken in early 2022 to the University of Michigan’s Museum of Natural History to see a planetarium show. Our daughters, six and nine at the time, were obsessed with space. It was January, and a biting wind whipped around campus as we made our way to the building.

Inside, we sat cuddled together, in the warmth of the theater’s glowing dome. We bent our heads back to look at the ceiling as a student narrator guided us through the Milky Way, then Andromeda, our nearest neighboring galaxy. Our tour guide continued to widen the image on the glittering screen above us, to show us the Virgo Supercluster, and its neighboring Taurus Void.

Further out still, was the Laniakea Supercluster, which encompasses 100,000 galaxies including ours. Laniakea and other superclusters are themselves encompassed by a giant cosmic abyss called the KBC Void, that is estimated to be roughly two billion light years in diameter. Somewhere in the middle of that cosmic abyss is our galaxy, the Milky Way.

The universe, as it turns out, is much bigger than we once comprehended. Scientists hypothesize that even the KBC Void is just a barely noticeable dot within the broader observable universe’s diameter of about 92 billion lightyears. And that’s just what we know right now.

The memory of sitting together in the dark womb of that planetarium stayed with me through my most disoriented moments. The twenty minute show had exploded my understanding of my own location in the universe. I replayed the image of the Milky Way spiraling against a widening span of darkness and space in my mind. I remembered what the student narrator had said - that our galaxy alone contains up to four billion stars. That when we look up at it from this planet (just one of the estimated one billion planets in our galaxy alone) many of those stars are faint or invisible. That for every star we can see with the naked eye, there are 20 million more we can’t.

These staggering facts were in my head each time I avoided my ghost reflection in the mirror all those months. The sheer magnitude of the universe compared to our human scale was strangely comforting. Cancer loomed malignant and all-consuming in my life, and yet there was something much, much bigger than myself and all of the nearly eight billion humans living on Earth. 

Thinking about our relationship to the vast universe provided a salient metaphor for my experience in cancer. Unlike the relatively minor illnesses and setbacks I had previously experienced, the further into cancer treatment I went, the more submerged I was in a tremendous web of unknowns. I was enveloped in a kind of palpable darkness where there was no solid ground.

As an artist and a writer, I have dedicated much of my life to the perpetual pursuit of locating myself – in time, space, physical environment, community; with actions, words, research, paint and pictures. Considering the ways we locate ourselves metaphorically, historically, environmentally, and spatially have kept my brain, body, and hands busy in one way or another for most of my adult life. After all, at its very essence the creative impulse is an attempt to record one’s own existence; to make a mark that says: I am here. 

In this darkness, though, surrender was a daily, if not hourly or constant experience. First I surrendered my sense of security to the cruel fact of my diagnosis. Then I surrendered control. Then I surrendered my body to the care of other people, some intimately close and some strangers. I surrendered many primary responsibilities and capacities of motherhood to gracious helpers all around me; much of the fulfilling expression of being an artist; and the joy and meaning of being a present and capable spouse and friend. 

My concept of myself began to take the shape of a chain of cut out paper dolls. If each paper cutout along the chain was a layer of identity, cancer had flattened me to the one thin layer at the end of the chain.

I wanted to reach out and grab the fragments - all those truncated pieces that were floating away– and stuff them in the pocket of my chemo sweatpants—my 33 year old self learning how to run again after the birth of our first daughter, up and down San Francisco’s steep hills; my 28 year old self counting seconds to Friday to head to the California Sierras to ski all weekend; my 20 year old self painting in lavender fields outside of Aix en Provence; my 17 year old self angsty to trade the security of home for college independence; my 9 year old self hiding out in the hull of my family’s sailboat, making friendship bracelets and eating sandwiches while they raced through the northerly waters of Lake Michigan.

Even as I recalled them, they slipped away. A disease that threatened to extinguish me had redefined my sense of myself and how I related to every aspect of my life and the larger world. No corner of my identity remained unturned. I wondered if those distant aspects of myself would vaporize forever.  

Submerged in the magnitude of the unknown, a new question arose:  how does a person locate themselves in total darkness? How does one orient when neither here nor there? I was not the person I was before, nor was I moving into the future. I was suspended; gravityless in a pause where a future was not guaranteed. How could I square my reality within the absurd vastness of it all (one tiny person out of billions on a single planet –  a spec of dust in the span of the universe)? 

I learned of the Celtic idea of Thin Places – which are described as places where the distance or separation between the real and transcendental is imperceptible. A thin place is where one becomes aware of existing in two worlds simultaneously. 

As the self I had known disappeared, I gravitated to the wisdom of the concrete physical world around me. Left with seemingly no other option, I allowed myself to feel the wonder and terror of the unknown, and it reciprocated by unveiling itself everywhere I looked. It was there in Lake Michigan’s ever changing waters; in the sudden storms that clawed across the horizon; on the shifting shoreline; in the wateriness of the water slipping through my fingers; in a dead herring gull laying on the sand with wings akimbo; in the cobalt night; in a fistful of spindly wildflowers; in twilight’s crushing glow; in the petrichor in spring. The natural world showed me its border places, its thin places, its wild unknown.

The night, when I laid in bed in total darkness, became another Thin Place. Awash in uncertainty, my ease with the night grew, as much as my discomfort did in the day. In the night I could let my body drift away and try to find my way back to my self. In dreams I could disassociate with the physical weight of my body. I could feel tiny moments of freedom from medical intervention. The night became a doorway to my most terrifying thoughts and my most loving ones.

I became friends with the night because there was no escaping it. Eventually I found myself sitting up at two or three am, urgently tapping words into my phone. Writing poetry was a balm to my otherwise total void of creative expression. Words - especially the most disparate, nonsensical ones- helped me begin to locate myself.

Middle-of-the-night poetry was the only creative act I could muster; it was a way to meet the chaos of the moment and to tangle with the grief. In writing down four, ten or thirty words I started to resist erasure. I am here.

I am convinced that artist and writer Tové Jansson, a sagacious interpreter of the natural world, must have known about Thin Places, too. She once said, “August is the border between summer and autumn; it is the most beautiful month I know. Twilight is the border between day and night, and the shore is the border between sea and land…The border is to be on the way. It is the way that is the most important thing.”

Concepts of day and night, light and dark, known and unknown, being and not being, became my guideposts, embodied in the physical world around me as they were, and as they are. I located them in the shadows of the forest, in the depth and expanse of the lake, and in the changing of the seasons. In the very fact that all around me in nature, death and life and change are intimately, infinitely symbiotic. Interlocked and entwined, like grief and gratitude, one made the other grow and make itself known. 

Now it is August again, and I am returning to the night on my own, because I like it there. A few days ago I woke to the loon’s melancholy serenade. Last night I stepped outside and stood in the driveway to bathe in the mystery of those billions of stars. 

It is in the night that I recognize myself most.

In her cogent and moving book, The Summer Book, Jansson describes the unique relationship of a Grandmother and her granddaughter Sophia who spend summer in their cottage on a remote island off the coast of Finland. In the book’s last chapter, aptly named “August,” Jansson describes Grandmother waking in the middle of the night:

When she woke up she lay for a long time and wondered if she should go out or not. It felt as if the night had come right up to the walls and was waiting outside, and her legs ached. The stairs were badly constructed. The steps were too high and too narrow, and then came the rock, which was slippery down toward the woodyard, and then you had to come all the way back again. No sense in lighting a light; it only makes you lose your sense of direction and distance, and the darkness comes closer. Swing your legs over the edge of the bed and wait for your balance to come right. Four steps to the door and open the latch and wait again, then five steps down, holding the handrail. 

Grandmother wasn’t afraid of falling or losing her way, but she knew the darkness was absolute, and she knew what it was like when you lose your hold and there’s nothing left to go by. All to the same, she said to herself, I know perfectly well what everything looks like. I don’t have to see it. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and waited for a moment. She took the four careful steps to the door and opened the latch. The night was black, but no longer so warm; there was a fine, sharp chill. She went down the stairs very slowly, turned away from the house, and let go of the railing. It wasn’t as hard as she’d expected. As she crouched in the woodyard, she knew exactly where she was, and where the house and the sea and the woods were. From far off in the channel came the thump of a boat sailing past, but she couldn’t see the channel lights. 

Grandmother sat down on the chopping stump to wait for her balance. It came quickly, but she stayed where she was. The coast freighter was headed east to Kotka. The sound of its diesel motors gradually died, and the night was as quiet as before. It smelled of fall. A new boat approached, a small boat, probably running on gasoline. It might be a herring boat with an automobile engine–but not this late at night. They always went out right after sunset. In any case, it wasn’t in the channel but heading straight out to sea. Its slow thumping passed the island and continued out, farther and farther away, but never stopping. 

“Isn’t that funny,” Grandmother said. “It’s only my heart, it's not a herring boat at all.” 

For a long time she wondered if she should go back to bed or stay where she was. She guessed she would stay for a while.

Tonight we are gathered together on the evening of a supermoon, a blue moon and a sturgeon moon—a rare convergence of celestial events that is said to represent abundance, transformation, introspection and resilience. What seems most powerful to me about the moon when it circles this near though, is how it tells us–at least for a moment–where we are in space, in time. It is one reliable, albeit transient, marker of our location. 

Tomorrow both earth and the moon will begin to shift as they continually do. Over the coming days the moon will travel on in its ever-varying orbit back toward the sun. Our bright view of it will diminish, and the sky will fade to darkness.

We are constantly moving close to and away from the unknown; swaying in and out of darkness. Perhaps, as our sharpest fears would have us believe, the darkness will engulf us. 

Or perhaps it might give rise to the chance to see more clearly. 

Perhaps we will find ourselves with a fierce, surprising capacity to stand amid it all; to mingle with it in ways we never imagined.

Maybe all we need to do is wait for our eyes to adjust.