I write this in a cramped airplane seat, smooshed between an amicable teenage stranger and Glenn, the love of my life. We are on a return trip to our honeymoon destination to celebrate a milestone, our 25^th wedding anniversary. I’m feeling thoughtful.

My inner feminist contemplates the heterosexual privilege that enabled us to marry so many years ago when others were forbidden by law to marry their sweethearts. Love is love! At the same time, my mushy heart reflects on what has enabled us to sustain our relationship for so long, with the good times far outweighing the bad.

For me, romance is what keeps love alive, but not the Hallmark variety. Instead, I understand romance in a way that I think will resonate with long-term cancer survivors and people who live with other chronic illnesses (and presumably some non-sick people as well).

Here’s how I explain romance to my undergraduate students. I teach a course called “Gender, Health, and Sexuality,” a more grown-up version of high school sex ed that features research on interpersonal communication about sex and sexual health. One of the exercises I use to help students think about their (possibly unrealistic) expectations of romantic or sexual relationships is having them write responses to this prompt: “Three things Disney movies never taught me about romance…”

Students’ answers are inevitably wonderful, running the gamut from “condoms are messy” to “how not to get pregnant” to “what to do when the prince cheats on you” and “sometimes two princesses fall in love.” I never horrify students by talking about my own sexual choices, even those made 30 years ago, but I deliberately gross them out with a particular story about romance.

A couple of years after the amputation of my right leg, I woke in the middle of the night, sweat beading along my forehead, nausea roiling in my stomach. I panted, trying to catch my breath as I grew increasingly certain that dinner would not remain in my stomach much longer. I reached for my crutches but fell back onto the bed, dizzy and unable to stand up. “Glenn,” I moaned. “Glenn! I need your help.”

“What? Huh?” asked Glenn, groggily.

“I’m going to throw up and I can’t get up. I can’t get my crutches,” I groaned.

My stomach started to convulse, and I slapped a hand over my mouth. Glenn sprang into action, grabbing the waste basket from his side of the bed and thrusting it in front of my face just as I threw up.

Turns out that above-knee amputees, weak with stomach flu, cannot maneuver our radically off-balance bodies (when we aren’t wearing a prosthesis) to the toilet (and even if we could, we certainly cannot kneel or otherwise get close enough for precision targeting of vomit).

After I lay back weakly, Glenn emptied the plastic basket of its vile contents, then lined it with a fresh trash bag, actions he repeated every few hours throughout the night and following day as I waited miserably for the flu to run its course. “Thank you,” I whimpered again and again.

“Of course, my love,” he answered each time.

“Now THAT is romance,” I declare to my students. “That is a love worth celebrating.” I see a variety of responses among the 20-21 year olds. Some nod, getting it. Others look thoughtful. A few look queasy or bewildered.

I ask them what romance means, scrawling key words of their responses on the board—whirlwind emotions, desire and love (or at least like) converging into passion, being swept off your feet, soul mates, being wooed with sweet words and flowers and special nights out.

“And how do you feel when you know that special person is being really romantic, going all out to let you know how they feel?” I ask.

“You feel special,” says one woman softly.

“You feel like they really get you, like they care about you,” says another.

“Exactly.” I respond.

If all goes well, we will celebrate our anniversary tomorrow night by dressing up and enjoying a romantic dinner in an upscale restaurant. I doubt it can compete with the flu for making me feel loved, but I’m willing to give it a try.

I have read several “best of 2017” book lists as we near year’s end. My favorite escape has always been books, and the calamity of our political climate is such that I have wanted to run and hide in books even more than usual.

I moved a lot growing up, and one of the things that comforted me when I landed in another new town was rereading my favorites, particularly the Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I identified with the author/heroine whose name I share and with her itinerant childhood, one part adventure and one part anxious longing for a permanent home.

So in the spirit of fostering comfort and respite, I offer a brief list of my favorite rereads of the year, books I have turned to again and again—one fantasy trilogy, one nonfiction book that offers hope, and one affirming tragedy.

The Circle Trilogy (Morrigan’s Cross, Dance of the Gods, Valley of Silence) by Nora Roberts. This is like Lord of the Rings crossed with a romance and an evil vampire saga, with time travel thrown in. As an academic, I am supposed to disdain genre fiction, particularly romance and “chick lit,” but I do not. Although I confess that my feminist sensibilities voice frequent objections, I adore this series, particularly the audiobook version. Six people—a witch, a wizard, a warrior, a scholar, a shape shifter, and a (good) vampire—join together to fight Lilith, the evil vampire queen. It takes three books to time travel, cross the Atlantic to Ireland, journey to the mythical land of Gael, have all three couples fall in love, wield lots of magic, and fight an epic battle, but (spoiler alert!) they save the (admittedly gender-stereotyped) world in the end. Yay!!!!

Help, Thanks, Wow by Anne Lamott. This is nonfiction, a reflection on prayer, which Lamott makes clear can be aimed at any sort of Higher Power, benevolent universe, Cosmic Muffin, or other god figure you like (she is a feminist and a liberal Christian.) She explains that “help!” “thanks!” and “wow!” enable us to reach outside of ourselves and connect with something larger. I have read this on Kindle and in paper, and also have the audiobook version, which I began to listen to on repeat instead of NPR after the political climate grew so grim I could no longer bear it during my morning commute. Help and thanks are self-explanatory, but wow (as a prayer) was unexpected. We say wow when a miracle occurs or we behold beauty, but we also say it as we witness the devastation of Hurricane Katrina or the magnitude of the Syrian refugee crisis. Lamott suggests experiencing our inability to fully comprehend either epic suffering or magnificence is a prayer. She’s irreverent, self-deprecating, and compassionate; she calms me down and offers me hope.

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. Two snarky teenagers meet in a badly run cancer support group. The disappointing movie reduces the story to star-crossed lovers, but the book is much richer and nuanced, despite its brevity. Hazel shares her favorite book, reread dozens of times, with Augustus, and this sparks friendship, love, and an adventure. I have never read a more accessible, more delightful, or more painful embodiment of the fundamental truth that bad things happen to good people. Eighty-percent of childhood cancer patients now survive, and that means the other 20%—thousands of kids—and their families experience excruciating loss that is magnified by the shame and bewilderment of ending up in the grim minority. Green affirms that life is not fair, that cancer happens to good people and not-so-good people alike, and that many who fight, persist, and pray suffer and die anyway. Kids with cancer are neither one-dimensional heroes nor angels but imperfect, regular people, and they don’t die because their parents didn’t pray hard enough or because of God’s plan. They die because that’s how it goes sometimes. I know this sounds depressing, but it comforts me enormously to hear again and again that cancer isn’t anyone’s fault, that we don’t owe it to anyone to be inspirational, that cancer sucks, and that we are still individuals (not just cancer statistics).

So that’s it, this year’s revisited narrative hiding places that sustained me when the strain of life became too much. May one of them prove to be a shelter for you when you need one.

(I do not receive any compensation for book recommendations.)

My back, shoulders, and (biological) foot and knee all ache, and I have a blister on the skin at the edge of my prosthesis. But I’m smiling as I write this. Glenn and I hosted a holiday open house yesterday, and it was lovely.

It was also exhausting—three whole days of work. I spent a day cleaning with a generous friend who organized all my clutter, a day planning the menu, shopping for food, and digging out holiday dishes and table cloths, and a day cooking, hosting, and cleaning up. Glenn did a ton of work, too, virtually all of the heavy lifting, and was incredibly patient with my control-freakiness. My mother kindly cooked some of the food and made the cookies and frostings for kids to decorate, and several friends helped us cook and serve, washed dishes, and gathered up dirty paper plates and other detritus during the party. And today we will have to spend at least a couple more hours cleaning up and putting things away.

But even with all the work involved, the process of opening my house to friends reaffirmed for me the fundamental truth that humans are designed to live in community with others.

I saw friends from different parts of my life come together in moments of politeness, kindness, and genuine interest in each other. Kids enthusiastically decorated cookies with gorgeous swirls and smears of frosting, brightly colored sugars, and sprinkles. I received more offers of help than I could imagine. I didn’t get as much time to talk to some people as I would have liked, but even that felt kind of good, like I was blessed to have so many wonderful people in one place that I couldn’t get enough of them in one afternoon.

In lieu of gifts, we asked for guests to bring warm socks, and our friends brought dozens of pairs that will be donated to people who are homeless in our local community.

At the end of the party, we lingered with several friends, talking and laughing and sharing our lives. We discussed books we had read recently. We all agreed that the new Thor movie is clever and surprisingly funny, and that it is classier to describe the actor Chris Hemsworth as “easy on the eyes,” rather than “freakin’ hot,” but really, both are accurate. I was able to offer support to one friend who is dealing with some extremely tough times, and it felt good to listen to her and offer her sincere compassion and admiration.

There is something about opening up your house, putting on your festive gear, preparing tasty tidbits, and welcoming your particular assortment of kith and kin into your personal space that feels both vulnerable and gratifying. It is a way of saying to others, this is our home where we are comfortable (which in our case includes a sheen of cat fur on most surfaces), and we hope you enjoy sharing our space for a little while.

Holidays can get busy and stressful, but this party was worth every ounce of time and energy because it fed my soul with human connection. While I am almost always a social person anyway, it nonetheless felt special to have so many people I care about in my home enjoying themselves.

Tomorrow I’ll get back to planning next quarter’s syllabus and working on my latest research paper. But right now I am relaxing with a sense of belonging and hope, a much-needed counter point to the crushing pain of national politics and the depression I have to fight off every morning in the face of each day’s new sexual harassment scandal.

For a brief time, we ate and drank and made merry together, and that is a wonderful thing.

I had coffee with friends this morning—well, I had Diet Coke and they had coffee—with whom I have gathered at local coffee shops most Wednesday mornings for the past 15 years. We shared laughter, our to-do lists, updates on mutual friends, and a little bit about the news. I left feeling nurtured and connected, with the added benefit of two recommendations for contractors who clean and repair rain gutters.

I love getting together with these women (and other friends) to share our lives, loves, and relationships, to support each other, and in short, to gather. There is no substitute for sitting, walking, playing, and eating together with friends. I truly value many long distance friendships, and I enjoy keeping in touch via Facebook and email and texting and phone calls. But I crave face-to-face communication with friends. I felt this way before surviving cancer, but recognition of the centrality of friends in my life deepened  during cancer and my ongoing struggle with late effects in the decades that have followed.

The weekly coffee date grew out of an early morning water aerobics class that some of us still attend. A few weeks shy of my 49th birthday, I am one of the youngest of the group, with the others ranging in age to their mid-70s. This group overlaps substantially with a group that gathers once a month as part of the Dining for Women organization, and also with some of my past and current co-workers. Having friends of all different ages is a tremendous gift.

My older friends have hilarious stories and tales of epic failures from having maintained  relationships—or not—and a wealth of fascinating experiences. Many of them are retired and have time for shopping trips, lunches, or theatre with me, all while continuing to pursue their interests in photography, genealogy, lay ministry, travel, sea turtles, volunteering, church, or good books.

I have friends who are close to my own age, and with them I have the comfort of sharing historical reference points—we remember when Jimmy Carter was elected President and where we were when the Challenger exploded. We enjoy singing along to the hits of the 80s while driving up the highway and groan over pictures of our big 80s hair. Recently we have noticed that we approaching our half-century mark.

And I love having friends who are younger than me. I have two millennial friends who are former students of mine who used to do house sitting and cat care for us when we traveled, and who are now my honorary nieces. They teach me things like what’s new in music and what current slang means. For example, it turned out that “Netflix and chill” does not mean what I thought it meant!

New faculty and graduate students I meet often are 15 or 20 years younger than I am, digital natives who can always seem to get the projector to hook up to my laptop correctly. They understand the academic world in a way that I no longer remember—when theory and methodology and enormous bodies of research still spread out before me as vast, uncharted wilderness to explore, and the language of academia had yet to be absorbed. I recall that I was terrified of learning to conduct my own research and looked with awe at senior scholars whose work I had read, but I can’t remember what the thrill and terror and awe felt like in my bones.

When I hang out with new scholars, I glimpse a time when I was less cynical and less sure I knew my field. I learn a lot from my younger colleagues’ fresh perspectives and keen awareness of the cutting edges of our fields. They ask different questions and make different connections among ideas than I do, and I love that.

My friend Bill Rawlins’ research on communication in friendship across the life span richly describes the rewards and challenges of friendship. “Friendship is part of living well, a part of being able to connect with others, a part of productivity, a part of a good romantic relationship, a part of facilitating community building, and it teaches people how to treat others with respect and joy,” he says. I agree.

I make it a priority to foster friendships both as rich, meaningful ends unto themselves and as sources of help, companionship, and, of course, recommendations for getting my gutters cleaned.

I just returned home after the annual convention of the National Communication Association, which was held in Dallas. On the third day, I encountered some technical difficulties, and I muttered to myself,  “#amputeelife, #thingsthatbipedsdon’tdealwith.” I felt very hip and millenial to have had a thought in hashtag form as a 48-year-old Gen-Xer, even as I endeavored to solve the problem.

That day I wore a dress with black thigh-high stockings. The stockings have stretchy bands at the top that keep them in place. The band on my bioleg (AKA left leg, original equipment) worked just fine. The band that I had pulled over the prosthetic socket that encases what’s left of my right leg would not stay in place on the super smooth surface of the socket, however.

Side note—it is not unreasonable to wonder why I bothered to put a stocking on my prosthetic leg, which is not covered with flesh-simulating foam but rather appears from the ankle up as a collection of mechanical parts. I do this mostly for symmetry. I have a white-person-colored, rubber foot cover on my prosthesis (so that I can wear the same size shoe on both feet). If I don’t cover the rubber foot when wearing my more formal shoes (read: black flats) and a black stocking on the bioleg, the peachy-beige rubber foot glows weirdly and contrasts horribly with the black shoes and black stocking-covered leg, particularly in fluorescent lighting. On a more practical level, it is also a lot easier to cram my prosthetic foot into the shoe when the rubber foot’s nonskid surface is covered with the smooth stocking.

Anyway, after the stocking slid down yet again, I rather impatiently yanked it up, with perhaps more force than necessary.

Riiiiiiiiiiippp! Uh oh.

The band lined with gripping material remained in my hand, but it was no longer attached to the stocking. Sigh. With no time to go to my room for another stocking, I dug through my computer bag, coming up with an elastic hair tie and a paper clip. I slipped the hair tie over my shoe and up my prosthetic “ankle” and “knee,” gathering the stocking material tightly at the point where the computerized knee joint attached to the socket, and I twisted the elastic tie as tightly as possible, securing it with the paper clip.

Miraculously, this fix held—see photo below—and my dress was long enough that it wasn’t visible. I told a friend of mine, and she pronounced it a “MacGyver moment,” referencing the TV show of our teenage years where the hero improvised highly improbable mechanical solutions to problems, a feat accomplished every episode via video montage with a signature soundtrack.

At that moment, it occurred to me that the creative work-arounds necessitated by my fairly regular bodily and device failures have often, although certainly not always, held well enough—both of the paperclip variety and of the extensively engineered titanium implant or computerized prosthesis variety. I reflected on the ingenuity needed to solve these big and little bodily failures, and it occurred to me that this is pretty much what it means to be a scholar.

Yes, I sometimes bemoan the number of mundane details, pains, and bodily annoyances I must deal with due to my particular body (while also acknowledging that there are many daily hassles, microaggressions, and burdens that my privileges enable me to avoid). But I also realized that my creative efforts to solve daily problems, cope with as much grace as possible, and even keep a stocking in place, actually provide me with great practice for addressing challenges in my research and writing.

How do I work around this barrier? How do I compensate for this missing piece? How do I forge connections where none exist? How do I explain this need to someone who has never experienced it? These are the same questions that scholars face, and I relish the challenge of constructing interesting and useful responses through my research.

Back home from the conference and comfortable in cotton socks and sneakers, I look back on a successful conference where I presented new ideas, met with both junior and seasoned scholars, enjoyed time with friends, and engaged in outside-the-box thinking to keep my stockings up.

 

 

Pigeons mate during spring; in Massachusetts, the season of pigeon lust begins in early May, a fact I had been unaware of until I had cancer surgery.

Here is a funny moment from when I had the first of the “limb salvaging” surgeries on my right leg to remove the tumor and insert a bone graft and metal hardware. It was 1989 and I was 20 years old.

My experience with that surgery was complicated by the randomness that resulted in me having a hospital roommate named Louise. She was a white lady in her late 60s and what my nana would have called, “quite a character.” Louise routinely joined my conversations with visitors uninvited, interrupted me when I was reading, watched TV all night so I couldn’t sleep, and offered her opinions on anything and everything to anyone who would listen. I did my best to be friendly at first and then resorted to being as civil as possible as I grew more and more exasperated.

But one afternoon, Louise made me laugh so hard that I will never forget it. I was reading the hardcover copy of Mitla Pass that my father had brought me when Louise started another of her diatribes.

“Oh my Lord would you look at that! Oh boy, oh my Lord, would you look at this?!”  I looked over at Louise, but I could see nothing out of the ordinary. I rolled my eyes and refused to encourage her by asking what she was so excited about. I tried to return to my book.

“Oh my LORD, those pigeons, look at this, would you look at THIS!” She jabbed her finger toward the window, and I shot her an annoyed look.

Louise shook her head, outraged. “Look at this, I can’t believe it, I can’t BELIEVE it! Can you believe this? I’m trying to eat!” She waved her hand at her lunch tray and looked at me indignantly, expecting me to join in her disgust.

I had no idea what she was talking about, and I didn’t care. I tried again to ignore her, but she ranted until finally I gave up.

“What are you talking about?” I asked with a sigh.

Gratified that she had my attention at last, Louise continued shouting, “You know what this is?  It’s progo! Pogo! What’s that called? Porno! It’s pigeon PORN!” I started to laugh as Louise waved her arms in the air, gesturing towards the window emphatically. “I said to Eddie—he says I’m as naive as they day I married him—but I says to him, how can they do it in all those positions? You on top of me, me on top of you, side-by-side, but now I’ve seen it all—look at those birds! NASTY birds, why don’t you go home?”

Through my laughter, I squeaked out, “The balcony outside our window probably is their home,” but she ignored me. It occurred to me that I ought to take notes in my journal, and I tried, but my laughter made it difficult.

Undeterred, Louise continued. “Go home! I wish I had a stick! If I was on a street corner and I saw two dogs doing it I would just walk away, but I can’t get away from this! I shouldn’t have to watch this!” Louise turned to watch me as I held my belly, gasping for breath as I continued to laugh. “Go ahead and laugh you! Go jump in the lake! I wish these birds would go jump in a lake too! Look at that, he’s right on her! Don’t they get tired? How long can they do it anyway? He’s walking away—good. Oh no, he’s BACK! Would you look at them go?! I shouldn’t have to watch this kind of stuff! Stop laughing! This is awful! Oh look, there’s another one! Are they going to have a three-way thing!? Ah, they are flying away. Good. Go home!”

A few minutes later, a doctor came in to examine Louise’s leg, and I was still laughing. The doctor kept missing Louise’s comments because she was so busy staring at me, presumably trying to figure out what was so funny.

Furious that she did not have her doctor’s undivided attention, Louise demanded, “Just ignore her, doctor! She’s just, well, just ignore her!”

I subsided into giggles, feeling grateful to Louise for the first (and only) time.

One… two… three… four… five… six… seven… hiss… I sucked air through my teeth as the pain hit, slowly releasing my breath as the pain receded. I slowly counted again, knowing that the waves came about every seven-eight seconds.

One… two… three… four… five… six… seven… hiss… the pain broke over me again.

Last night was bad. The phantom pain ravaged my missing leg. I managed to fall asleep, but then I woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep for a long time, despite taking a sleeping pill earlier.

I struggled not to tense the muscles in my leglet (stump), since that only made the pain worse, but it was almost impossible not to brace myself as the waves of pain hit, over and over again in the quiet darkness.

My phantom limb buzzed and twitched and hurt, a real, living part of me, even though it is gone. Tonight’s pain manifested as searing electrical shocks that cramped and burned across the top of my foot and ankle.

Glenn lay sleeping next to me, his warm back solid and comforting. On the other side, my cat Westley curled up with his head resting on the edge of my pillow, snoring softly. I listened to Glenn and Westley’s stereo breathing, each following his own rhythm, as I panted through the pain. Their syncopated breathing was adorable but insufficient to calm my whirling brain.

Nothing is as lonely to me as lying awake enduring waves of pain.

For a time, I practiced my gratitudes, not to deny my pain but to build a loving context for it. I am grateful for my warm, safe house. I’m grateful to have enough money to pay my bills, have a reliable car, and go to Maine every summer. I’m grateful to have a good job. I’m grateful for Glenn and my friends and family. I’m grateful for Westley and Buttercup. I’m grateful that I can afford to travel to professional conferences. I’m grateful for purple scarves and Diet Coke and dark chocolate with salted caramel and my new book on embodiment.

Sighing, I tried to turn on my left side; I prefer my right but can only lie on that side when the phantom pain isn’t bothering me. Lying on my right side squishes my leglet, and that intensifies the phantom pain.

After turning on my left side—slowly and carefully, taking great care not to disturb Westley, like a good cat mom—I then went through a series of twitches and adjustments to my leglet so that my phantom limb could settle comfortably.

As it inevitably does, my mind began sorting through the events of the day and the previous few days to figure out the genesis of this painful episode. Is it because of the travel and jet lag? Is it the stress of the committee work and writing deadlines and conference presentations that are due next week? Did I walk too much or not ride my exercise bike enough? Did I stay up too late the previous night? Is it the Diet Coke? The questions all circled back to one question: Is the pain my fault?

I breathed slowly and deeply, exhausted and needing another distraction. I tried singing in my head a psalm put to guitar music that the leader of my college Intervarsity Christian Fellowship group used to play.

As the deer pants for the water

So my soul longs after You.

I have absolutely no idea why I still remember this lovely song fragment, but it’s one of my go-to ways to calm myself. Every time my brain circled back to various sources of stress—damn, I forgot again to order those tickets!—I restarted the song, hearing Brian strumming along on his guitar.

That stopped working, too. I wanted to search for my earbuds and cell phone to listen to an audiobook, but I knew from experience that this would disturb Westley and likely cause him to leave. It’s less lonely with him there, so I discarded that idea.

Next distraction was making lists. What do I need to get for Thanksgiving dinner? Fresh cranberries, stuffing mix, dried poultry seasoning, potatoes, apple cider. Did I buy stocking presents for the New Hampshire branch of the family? How many book fliers do I need for next week’s conference?

I must have drifted off at some point, because I woke to my alarm clock, tired and cranky. Doing a quick internal scan, I was relieved to notice that the phantom pain had passed for now. I sighed gratefully as I disturbed Westley long enough to shut off the alarm and start the new day.