keep the machine running
death and neighbours
Although it’s hard to say aloud, and I prefer to keep this thought to myself, there have been a few times when I’ve been really grateful to have cancer.
I first had the thought when I was able to step back from my job. I did admin for a local non-profit, the kind that tries to get houses to the unhoused but really mostly created paperwork. I hadn’t realized how drained and jaded I’d become until I went on a leave to get through the surgeries and treatment. After that, knowing I would have to return, my mental health plummeted even further – I decided to quit entirely. I made do on social assistance until there were enough readers on my blog to support my basic needs. Many were dear friends who supported my writing or at least supported me doing it and a few were feminists from far-flung parts of the world. The income was by no means steady, but it kept the rent paid to my mom.
I got to make my living, such as it was, from writing, and I could only do that because I’d gotten cancer.
I do wonder if I’ll be continuing the freelance jobs. It seems in poor taste to email the grad students I edit for and ask if their PhDs are still ongoing or if the collapse of academia was imminent. Hard to imagine the content from the unfunny and over-long titles of those projects could retain any value in a post-hope world. But if they continue to sent, I decide I’ll continue to edit. I’ll do my part, like Prime Minister Kline requested, to keep the machine going.
The other reason I’m grateful for cancer, the biggie really, is because I probably won’t be alive to see the shit really hit the fan. The whole thing almost feels low stakes for me. After years of treatments, hopeful remissions, and dreaded recurrences, my doctors had at last said, everything we do from now on is palliative. We can buy time with chemo and other treatments, but it doesn’t look like we’re getting this under control.
On my end, my hope had really just been to live long enough for someone to cure cancer, or at least my type of cancer. No matter where my cancer ends up next, it’ll always be ovarian cancer. It could travel to my lungs and still that’s what it’ll be called. The first place of possession.
I’m on my bed upstairs with my laptop open on my knees. I want to post something about what’s just been broadcast, but it feels too huge to distill into words, and also so pathetically small. With every single person with a social media account frantically posting their tearful reaction videos to various sites, and no one really watching, there didn’t seem to be any point in adding my thoughts to the cacophony. And yet I do know there are people who will read my words. I know because there always have been, but I also know because I’ve gotten comments on my previous blog posts requesting an analysis.
I haven’t got an analysis. I haven’t even got a knee-jerk reaction. All I really have is a desire to offer sanctuary, and an illness that will close the curtains for me before things get really dark.
A few paragraphs slide onto the page, but writing feels distant and inadequate. I save the doc and close my laptop screen, forcing it into sleep. I enter Jenna’s room, my sister who went missing, unmissing, and is still out of reach. The pale pink room envelopes me like the insides of bowels. I see without seeing the tucked in dolls, the cutesy stationary on her pink desk, a pink crystal suncatcher in her window. I cross the floor to the stack of boxes and pull a flashlight out. Pressing the button, I can see it still works, but I take extra batteries from the same box just in case.
On my way downstairs, I can hear my mom and sister talking about the Prime Minister’s speech, picking it apart for meaning, hidden or blatant.
“Does he actually expect people to go to work?” my sister asks. “Money is like, the worst incentive right now. It doesn’t mean shit.”
“Maybe people will start, you know, bartering. Barter and trade, like the old days.”
“The time to figure that out has long passed,” Tricia says, voice thick with doom. “It’s more likely people will start looting and robbing.”
“Oh, I don’t think people will jump to that, especially not here.”
“There’s already a lot of people suffering here,” Tricia reminds her. “Homeless people who’ve been ignored by the town for years. What’s to keep them, or anyone else for that matter, from speeding along the decline?”
“I’m going next door,” I announce, pulling on my boots. “To water plants.”
“Want company?” my sister asks.
“Nah, I’ll only be a minute.”
Tricia looks disappointed and I’m pretty sure she’d prefer watering plants in the dark to confronting my mom’s hopium.
Instead of walking down the short driveway to the sidewalk and then up to the house next door, I cut across both our yards like I always had when coming to visit Ms. Delapaz. It’s spring and I am thankful the announcement hadn’t come in fall or winter. At least we have time to try to save whatever produce we can, to preserve and can and dry.
Seasons were unpredictable following the breakdown of the arctic jet stream, but the crocuses still came up in April, lilacs bloomed in May, strawberries in June, snow peas in July, potatoes in August, and a cluster of native plants like Goldenrod, Rudbeckia, Boneset, and all types of Asters in September. October still brings pumpkins. Lots has changed but but not everything.
It’s clear as soon as I enter Holly’s house with the key she gave me that she’d left without intending to come back. I pull my toque low over my ears, a mainstay in my wardrobe long before chemo first took my hair and then transformed it into grey-tinged crinkles, the toque all the more appreciated now that I couldn't rely on a formerly thick shock of hair to keep me warm.
Drawers had been ferreted through, left open. There were at least two broken dishes on the kitchen floor, their shards mingling. The bedroom had been stripped of linens with such vigour that the mattress sits askew on the box-spring. I do a quick tidy, nudging the mattress back into place, closing drawers and cabinets, and sweeping up the broken glass.
The dustpan hovers over the garbage can under the sink. If I fill this garbage can, then I’ll have to tie the bag off and leave it somewhere. Traditionally, that place would be the end of the road. The Prime Minister didn’t say anything about garbage pickup. I’ve been alive through multiple garbage strikes, both in Ontario and plenty down south. I know things can get ugly fast without intervention. And with the amount of wildlife we have here, the streets would be full of trash in a couple weeks. The terrifying upside is that eventually, we won’t have any more garbage. It’s not like the amazon orders will be arriving, twice-weekly grocery store shops bringing home half a pound of single-use disposable plastic.
What then? I wonder. I can’t stop the ‘what thens?’. I can get so far in my imaginings and then there’s like a solid wall that thunks into place, blocking out any thoughts that would lead me down a shaky path that makes my hands go cold and my eyes lose focus. My body is protecting me from what then.
Having another house to take care of is an interesting development. One of my first thoughts when Holly handed it over was, “How many women could live here?”
It feels selfish to not open these doors to people who need them, but I need time first. I need to figure out how I’m actually going to decide who gets to stay, what will be expected of them – what if I have to ask someone disruptive or toxic to leave? Asking a nearly agoraphobic introvert to supervise two houses of women during a collapse of civilization was a big ask, all the while dealing with incurable cancer that drains energy from every cell.
I take a seat on the sofa, a cozy sectional specked with dog hair, and catch my breath. If I think of ten women between the two houses, including my own family, I begin to lose my mind. Already it’s too much. One at a time, and right now, it’s just me. I don't need to be responsible for anyone in this moment expect myself – and the houseplants.
I stand up to start looking for the watering can when the back door opens, a solid shwoosh that brings in the sound of the wind-chimes from the backyard. I press myself against a wall – I can’t see them but if they don’t enter the living room, they won’t be able to see me either. My body takes the shock deep into my gut, and I’m terrified in the moment but also looking all the way down the line, past this encounter. Is this to be my life? Frozen in fear, constantly? Have I known my last peace?
I can hear the person rummaging in the kitchen. Drawers I had closed are tugged open again.
The intruder admits a small, satisfied exhale, and I think they’re moving to the back door, to leave.
Fairly certain they’ll be faced away from me as they leave, I peek around the corner. A short woman with an incredibly long black brain down the middle of her back slips through the back door, then turns to close it behind her. In doing so, she looks directly into my eyes. I can tell she’s debating bolting, but why bother – I know where she lives.
“Claudette?”
Claudette, a neighbour with an unruly yard, a late-night transit commute, and an unerring ability to put her garbage and recycling out early or late, says, “Yes?”
“What are you doing in here?”
“In Holly’s house?”
“Uh, yes,” I say, coming out from behind the wall.
“No offence, but what are you doing here?” She narrows her eyes and draws dark eyebrows into a frown so serious as to be comical.
“I have keys. Holly gave them to me, so I can watch after the place.”
“Well, Holly gave me these.” Claudette holds up a pair of kitchen scissors.
“She did, eh?” I say, because I have no idea what else to say. There’s almost no possible way Holly bequeathed her kitchen scissors to our slightly whacked neighbour who was, in point of fact, notorious for borrowing items and then returning them quite worse for wear on the loaner’s doorstep. Sometimes in the rain. Often directly in the path one takes while leave one’s house in a rush. Not that I hold a grudge or anything.
“She did. She was quite generous, you might recall. I have to go.”
And Claudette leaves through the backdoor with the shears, tromping through the yard while holding them aloft in front of her, as if very decidedly not running with scissors. I lock the back door behind her and think I’m definitely going to have to watch out for her, but probably not in the way Holly asked me to.