Canning hope

Every once in a while I get to spend the day cooking. I live in wonder of those days - they come along only a few times a year. Last week I had two in a row. For the first time in my life, I spent the better part of Thursday and Friday canning. The sun came in through the bay window, I turned on my 'fun' playlist, and I canned. And I canned. And I canned. And I got more and more tired...And happier and happier.

For a couple of days, sitting on my floor were huge plastic bags of loot - the haul we brought back from St. Jacobs Farmers' Market...carrots, potatoes, radishes, beets, leeks, peppers, plums, blueberries, pickling cucumbers, garlic, dill, and of course peaches and tomatoes. A half bushel of peaches. A bushel of tomatoes. And not just any tomatoes. San Marzanos.

I felt the urgency of getting going - before the rot set in, and on my floor. For the first time in a long time I fell into a planning frenzy. I bought a canner, a jar lifter, a funnel, and a dozen jars. A whole dozen. Yes, they were wide mouthed (you only buy the others once - unless you're making jam). I bought 12. And right now my kitchen table, counter, pastry worktop are covered with 23 jars - and that's just the tomatoes. So while I was up to my elbows in tomato skins, Steve made a midday run to the store for two dozen more.


Starting Thursday with my Mum, and continuing Friday on my own, I washed, blanched, peeled, stuffed, and processed 23 quarts of tomatoes. Nine litres of peaches. Five litres of dill pickles.

There is something about preserving food at its best. There's an optimism, a resilience, a sense of self preservation, a sense of being capable, a sense of independence, of worth, a sense of capturing something at its peak of life and suspending it there - a sense of magic.

Yes. Sometimes a tomato is just a tomato. But I wouldn't have a blog if I couldn't find meaning in it all, would I?

I have wanted to put up tomatoes on the shelf for years. And I've always let the chance slip by.

Even this many days later I can't actually move them downstairs. The jars are sitting on the kitchen counter because I am marvelling at the beauty of them.

Maybe I'm asking too much of the preserves but they feel like they're filled with hope. The art of the possible.

Here are some of the things I learned that I didn't expect:
I have a lot of dishtowels - and I'm glad.
I am glad I have a big roll of plastic and cut a piece to cover our dining table.
I am glad to have had my big cutting boards out to let the hot jars rest on.

I used more pots than I expected - the canner, the stock pot to blanch the fruit, another pot to sterilize the seals and rings, and another with spare water kept on the simmer in case the canner didn't have enough water once I put the jars in.
I also filled the electric kettle and boiled that.
I LOVE my dishwasher's sanitize setting. It meant sterilizing a pile of jars all together. And once they were done, I just left them closed in the dishwasher until I needed them. 

This was also about grit. I took a personality test once that determined your grit score - and I didn't do very well...and yes I think I'm fairly gritty...and yes, I think we can fade in and out of our gritness - and perhaps that was a low point. But looking at the bags on the floor I knew I had to follow through. They hadn't been alive and grown and blossomed and matured, only to rot on my kitchen floor. True grit. And I paid homage to buddhism too - When I peeled the tomatoes, I just peeled the tomatoes. When I stuffed the jars, I just stuffed the jars. I was in the moment. I did it with joy. And I hope that comes through whenever we start opening those jars. 

I Was a Sibling Once

Foreboding joy. I didn’t know there was a name for it.

I came across it in Brené Brown’s work. I’ve been inspired this week to read more from the University of Houston research professor who came to my attention a few years ago in that spellbinding TED talk she did on vulnerability. She has spent years and years talking to thousands of people about how shame and vulnerability have shaped their lives. Because it does.

I know it.

I, and perhaps I should say we, seem to have slipped down the slope towards reckoning again. I know so many people who are rethinking their lives – their careers – their relationships…it’s a sine wave that oscillates through time…I figure we get to reckon…then we get to test…then we get to deploy what we’ve learned until the next down curve. 

Wheeeeeee….

I’m reading Brown’s Daring Greatly in the hopes it can inspire me to believe more in me…so I can believe in myself the way I believe, with jaw-dropping awe, in my beautiful friends and family and husband.

She argues that joy is 'probably the most difficult emotion to feel'. Foreboding joy is that sense you can’t trust how good you’ve got it. That life will kick you in the ass as soon as you relax into joy. So, don’t try it, don’t tempt fate, and best of all, expect the worst.

Well I know that feeling well. I grew up with it. Might as well expect the worst. Because that’s what happens. The worst.

I came by it honestly.

Brené Brown wrote about looking at her children sleeping – and in that moment full of bliss, she let her guard down…feeling all the love that took her breath away. And in the next moment her mind was flooded with images of terrible things happening to them, “I was sure that no one but me pictured car wrecks and rehearsed the horrific phone conversations with the police that all of us dread…”

My mother got that call.

On the evening of November 23rd in 1970.

My brother, Richard, just two weeks after his 20th birthday, went away with a friend for the weekend. They were going horseback riding. It was cold, so cold that November. His friend pulled up in the red Volkswagen beetle, Richard got in…the sun was going down, the light was very blue and wintry. We heard nothing until the phone rang.

I picked it up. I was seven. I can still hear the man with the Quebecois accent asking to speak to my mother.

Mum was…I don’t know…breaking apart while she listened. When she hung up, she told me there had been an accident. Richard was injured.

The cop wanted to come over. Mum was scared. She called our neighbours around the corner, Uncle Eddie and Auntie Lise…Eddie showed up right away. I ran next door, I think, to get Auntie Val and tell her something had happened.

When the cop arrived I was told to go to the bedroom and close the door. I did. But I went to my Mum’s room, not mine.

And I remember putting my two hands on her dresser and staring hard…so hard into the mirror. Looking for something – I don’t know what…horror, fear…an answer to why this family was being cursed with so many tectonic earthquakes. My father had left a few years before to be with someone else. My brother ran off to live with friends downtown – and turned to drugs to medicate his way through his young manhood which was bearing down on him hard - which took us to more than one hospital in the middle of the night as he overdosed, got hepatitis, freaked my Mum out. Mum had had to go to work, I was bounced from house to house for daycare – and I remember just nodding my head and going with the flow…and trying not to be shattered by it all. Tectonic.

When they called me out of the bedroom, Mum was pulling on her coat. She said I was going to stay at Uncle Eddie’s and Aunt Lise’s until morning. She had to go to the hospital. I wanted to go with her. I didn’t need any more separation. But it was not an option.

The red Volkswagen had raced down the backroads of our small town of Chambly. They were narrow country roads, and there were a couple of small bridges crossing the nearby creek that tumbled into the Richelieu River. We’d had a hard freeze. Snow and ice everywhere. The driver was going too fast – he jumped a bridge, hit a curve, couldn’t make it, slid on ice, and the car tumbled a couple of times and hit a tree. This was not the era of headrests, seatbelts, or airbags. Richard sprawled across the car. The driver crawled out…unharmed.

The next morning I was getting ready for school when Uncle Eddie said I could go see Mum. She wasn’t at home though. She was next door at Auntie Val’s. When I walked in the weight of the air was oppressive and scary. People were around her, all of them looking at me. But all I could really see was her. Mum’s face is seared on my brain. It’s broken into a million pieces, like glass that hasn’t come apart…not yet…but is about to crumble into shards on the ground and impossible to ever fix. She tells me Richard has been in an accident that has caused brain damage. Which at least means he’s alive, I think…but she says no, he's dead.

Okay. Okay. Okay….Okay…

Go to school. Be normal. Life without my brother begins.

In my mother’s own way she tried to keep me from everything painful…I went to school…even during his funeral.

Then things turn into snapshots – my father calling short a vacation with his girlfriend in Barbados. He comes home. When I ask him to stay, he promises never to leave again. He can’t keep it. The sense of adrenaline in my body as I tell my teacher, Mrs. Barry, that Richard died last night. Weirdness. And then her face. And that I’m fine. Just fine.

My mother breaking down as my brother’s best friend comes in the door for the funeral reception – I was home from school as people were arriving. ‘Oh,’ she wails. You can hear a pin drop as everyone looks on. He stops cold in the foyer…She blurts out, ‘if you had come home for the weekend he wouldn’t have gone away.’ But he didn’t come home, couldn’t. So Richard decided to go away with his other friend. 'Shall I leave?' he says. My mother recovers herself, says no of course not…and he comes in…

In the summer of 1970 my brother had finally come home to live. He was getting through his drug addiction – on his own. And yes, that led to some interesting scenes where holes got punched in cupboard doors and walls. Yikes.


I remember after he came home that I was able to tell the neighbourhood kids, ‘my brother will come beat you up if you mess with me.’ I remember him tickling me so hard, that I actually didn’t like having a brother very much at that moment. I remember him patiently examining my attempts at making letters and words. I remember my need to impress him. I remember he decided he was going to become a teacher. And go back to school in January. I remember he loved cooking. I remember he could climb on the roof of the house, without a ladder, to look at the sunset. I remember his guitar. Then his electric guitar…and jumping out of my skin late at night when he turned on the amp. I remember he had a car in the garage – that never worked. I remember him giving me a little leather tobacco pouch that he had. It’s on my mantle now – and it’s my talisman of family. I remember him taking me out for Hallowe’en. In 1970 they almost cancelled Hallowe’en because of the FLQ crisis. Richard walked me round to get my candy. And I felt pretty damned safe, let me tell you. I don’t remember my costume. Little did I know I had but three weeks more with him.

A song by Frank Sinatra called ‘Didn’t We’ came out then…and it used to make Mum cry and probably still would…because it was about almost making it…and Richard, with Mum's help, almost had.

I also lost touch with everyone who knew him – at least until facebook came along. And without them I forgot, or never knew, what he was really like. And at seven when you lose someone like that, you forget what they look like… He had long hair. He was tall. I couldn’t remember life with him. I couldn’t remember his face or his laugh. He disappeared.

And I started calling myself an only child.

So I grew up knowing that sense of foreboding joy. That shit does rain down on people. The phone does ring. And sometimes it is the cops. And after almost 40 years of armouring myself against that, I started a long journey of reckoning. And I let myself know that I wasn’t fine. That it sucked. It was unjust. And it hurt. And it made me so angry.

I don’t know why these things happen to good people. There’s no judgement in nature. It just is.

And reckoning, I've learned the hard way, is actually the upside of the curve of the sine wave. An uphill battle, mind you...but upwards.

I do know love. The real thing. And my Mum and I made it through the worst of things, even those that were yet to come.

I reconnected with a friend of Richard’s, and a couple of years ago we finally met for dinner. I now tease him mercilessly like I’ve known him my whole life. And occasionally he looks at me weirdly – he can see Richard in me. I know it. I hope it doesn’t cause him pain. When we left the restaurant we walked back to our car to give him a ride back to his hotel. My husband, mother, our re-found friend and I heard a whooshing sound overhead…loud enough for us all to look up. A meteor left a trail of silver sparks across the night sky. It was low, and blindingly bright, and beautiful. We all looked at each other…no one spoke. Maybe, just maybe it was a talisman of joy…just pure unadulterated joy. I'd like to think so.

with even mind

I reached a new state last week - one I've never known, it's colourful, it's peaceful - it's aware of fear but is more aware of joy - mostly it's a place of certainty, although I'm not sure of what.

I've reached the state of equanimity.

Getting hit with a diagnosis of breast cancer was like being thrust through a portal to a place I didn't want to know, never wanted to visit, let alone live.

As those first few days passed, I found myself begging and pleading to know how to get through the fear and anxiety. If I could conquer it, control it, I would be helping myself, no, in fact I'd be leading myself beyond this frontier of diagnosis. I couldn't go back. Life wasn't that way anymore. There was no way back. I had to move forward - but I didn't know where.

So bearing the dent of the two-by-four that the diagnosis slammed into my forehead - like a passport - I felt my way forward. No path, no directions, no map.

Strangely, bits and pieces of the path dropped in front of me. Just when I thought I was stepping off into mid-air, there would be another piece.

This is my path.

First piece - my Steve.

Then there's my friends and family.

~

So in the beginning, I felt what I felt when I felt it.

People layered me in survival stories - the grandmother who had advanced breast cancer in her 40s and lived to 93, the mother of three who had stage III, lymph-node-positive cancer who is thriving now.

Of course others just told me stories of whole families felled by death. I learned to look at them dumb with wonder. And then found myself bursting with laughter when I re-told the stories later. There's a whole blog to come about the stupidest things people said to me.

One colleague told me her aunt had it and lost six years of her life. She didn't remember anything - not even her niece's wedding. And yet she has beaten it (she made it through the crucial five year mark). My jaw dropped.

I went home, grabbed Steve by the arms, looked into his eyes like my life depended on it and told him, "There is no way this is going to own me. This isn't all of me. It's a small part. I can't live with the feeling of being hunted for the next five years. I am not going to give up feeling what's going on right now. I am not going to lose the present. Don't let me lose sight of that."

"I promise," Steve said.

The next day I bought a charm bracelet in support of the Run for the Cure.

~

Over the years I've dabbled in meditation. I have never taken a course. I only ever taught myself about quietness of mind - and like everyone I'd sit, close my eyes and my mind would start up a full discussion about how great it was to be in a quiet mind...and how not quiet my mind was...and then I'd sigh, forgive myself, and start over.

I did it now.

I even bought books - Meditation for Beginners - and found Meditation for Dummies, I'm not kidding, at the library.

It's working.

~

I have been seeing a psychotherapist for a few months, by chance, dealing with anxiety stuff, trying to understand where it comes from, trying to gain some balance between my heart and mind and soul about what I want in life and how I got here. Jan helped me look through childhood wounds (as first my Dad left, then my brother ran away, then died in a car accident) to see how I've coped since and how I haven't.

She asked one day what I saw inside - what the pain looked like. And I described a slit, ragged, stony, and through it I could see blindingly bright flowing lava. It moved so fast it took my breath away. I told her the lava wasn't the problem...that lava was the core of me, the essence of me, the truest part of me. But the slit...she asked...it's a wound I said.

And to the edge of the wound, on her knees looking in was a little girl. Me...of course, the girl of those years. When Jan asked me what I would say to that little girl if I could - I blurted out without hesitation, "Oh little one. You're fine. You're wonderful. And I love you so much. Unconditionally." And I cried.

Jan buys big, big tissue boxes.

That was a few months back.

I still, not exactly talk to the little girl, but am "present" with her - reassuring her, helping her feel safer. There is such love in that and forgiveness.

During that first week of coming to grips, I went to bed one night. I rolled on my side and said to her through the air, "Hey little one." She looked up at me. "You were so resilient through all that stuff. I need you now. I need your strength. I need you to help me."

She held out her hand - without hesitation. I grabbed it. She smiled and came to me. She just walked into my arms for a hug - and has been near me ever since. She plays, she dances, she reads, she sleeps, she sits in my lap and lets me hold my arms around her.

We, she and I, seem to have come full circle.

~

My Mum has been wondrous. She's been here. She survived colon cancer at 46. She's 80. So she gets my irritation at people's fear. My irritation at their bone-headed observations. She gets my need to laugh. As always her core of iron inspires me.

~

Two weeks after my diagnosis to the day - a friend went for her own biopsy. It came back positive. We're now cancer patients together. I was unnerved. I felt icky. Her cancer is larger and more aggressive. I couldn't put my finger on it - but I felt guilty for being luckier. It was hard to take. They have whipped her into the system. She will be through her surgery this week, while I'm about to go in and talk about my surgical plan.

I brought it up with Steve. He said, "You have been given the gift of perspective. And you have someone who truly understands what you're going through."

I felt a great weight lift.

~

The same day I heard about my friend I had results back from my MRI and ultrasound tests - my other breast is behaving itself. And the MRI didn't show up any surprises. The twinges of aches, the thought that with every passing minute the cancer is getting a tougher and tougher grip on the rest of my body - my doctor told me is totally normal to feel - but I'm fine. There is no sign of it outside the breast.

I felt another great weight lift.

~

Everywhere I turn, people tell me how lucky I am to have the surgeon I have. Even my co-diagnosed friend, who ironically works in the breast cancer field, told me during her diagnosis process she called her favourite contacts to find out who she should see here - and one name came back at her, my surgeon. Another colleague of mine had her. A nurse who didn't work for her, but respects her enormously, told me how lucky I was...and the surgeon's senior fellow told me how she's been through thousands of operations with her, and she's unbelievable.

I'm in good hands. Another weight...gone.

~

Now...the knowledge. I couldn't face the research. And yet, I'm a researcher/producer by trade. My day job is to find and research stories - and I've spent years digging passionately into science and medicine. But my body and brain went on strike when I went near the books my surgeon gave me. My stomach tightened. I turned the books over so I couldn't see them, then buried them under home decorating and food magazines.

Out of sight...out of mind...Not so much.

Steve was going to read up on it for me - a need-to-know basis only.

Then last week I dug into Wellspring's website - a cancer care support centre. Then I went to the Dragons Abreast team website. Then to the Canadian Cancer Society's website. Then the National Cancer Institute's website - both the patient's info and then the health professionals' info. Then onward to the primary research articles and by midnight I was perusing the journals on PubMed to see what they're finding out about various chemo treatments.

I was on the couch, laptopped and square eyed, and I laughed as I said to Steve, "I'm back."

He asked me what I meant. I told him I was researching. He smiled at me, with his whole face, eyes twinkling. "I'm glad. That's what I've been waiting to hear."

It was instinctive not to research until I was ready. And something just told me I was ready.

I tore through another book this weekend - The Breast Cancer Survivor Manual.

~

Then I found out last week - my friends are harnessing their energy and creating a team for the Run for the Cure on September 30th. How can I repay their love?

~

My place of joy has rooted itself. I have love, inside and out. I'm happy. By the end of the third week I gripped Steve's arm again and said, "Is it right that I feel normal again? Am I denying something? Do I have my head in the sand? I feel normal."

And he reassured me that all this emotional work is paying off in huge dividends, bigger than I knew possible.

Any news, good or bad will be what it is.

And I know I'm feeling normal, my black humour is in full swing.

~

These are the disparate pieces that led me here. As I said, I wanted to reach a state of equanimity. And after a few days I thought I'd better look it up to be sure it means what I think it means.

Main Entry: equa·nim·i·ty Pronunciation: "E-kw&-'ni-m&-tE, "e-kw&- Function: noun Inflected Form(s): plural -ties
Etymology: Latin aequanimitas, from aequo animo with even mind
1 : evenness of mind especially under stress

Hahm Sah - I am That.

And I'm here.

Now if I could only trust that that's what this is.