The day before chemo, Lu surprises me with a wall-size photograph of Muhammad Ali, the moment after he knocks out George Foreman in Kinshasa. It’s one of those almost impossible photographs where time has stopped—Ali is standing, Foreman is on the ground. Ali has clearly won, but it’s not the glory that hits you, it’s the shock and the stagger of the struggle. It’s clearly one second before Ali realizes he is champion, and you can imagine him a moment later prancing around, raising his gloves, bragging and celebrating. But here he is dazed and empty. Toast and I hang the photo on the wall and it becomes a kind of visual mantra board. I will turn to it many times a day over the next months. Ali is me. Foreman is my cancer.
I watch Toast arranging my chemo pills in our new purple pill tray box. He is parceling out the capsules like Pez, doing it so perfectly and exactly. Monday: Emend, Zofran, Advil; Tuesday: Emend, Zofran … I want to kiss him.
Then Sue arrives. She has not been my therapist for many years. We are post-therapy friends, which means we have dinner occasionally in vegetarian restaurants and talk about death and trauma. I call her when I have insufferable anxiety or when I need a reminder that my self-hatred is really massive anger. She heard from a friend that I had cancer and is giving me free sessions as a gift. I can hardly believe it. I can tell she is pretty shocked to see me. I am super skinny and wobbly, with a buzz cut. We sit on the couch, a stunned Ali as our backdrop. Sue was the shrink I finally found after all the others. I first saw her when my marriage was falling apart. I had just come back from a trip to Germany where the Berlin Wall was coming down. The first night in Germany I had a terrifying dream. My father was raping me with an object and my mother was calmly watching. I woke up screaming. This was after ten years in New York City therapy with two different shrinks, both telling me, like Freud, that everything I thought happened with my father was just my fantasy. Sue was the first person who was not afraid of my memories. When I told her my dream, she said, “It could be a dream, Eve. But sometimes dreams are also memories. I sense you have been terribly abused. I think I can help you.”
Sue was a psychic surgeon who reattached shards of body sensations to memories. She had never been in my loft and it never occurred to me she would ever sit on my couch or actually touch my things. Shrinks live in offices.
“Tell me everything,” she says. I start to cry. “I have been very sick. There was a huge operation and then an infection. Now they are going to poison me. I do not think I can do the chemo. I am not good with things in my body. It’s why I never did ayahuasca in the rain forest. I knew I would embarrass myself in front of the shamans and the elders. I don’t do well vomiting. I could never be a bulimic.” I remind her I am totally claustrophobic.
Sue tells me that she has never understood how I have not been sick before. She tells me she knows I will survive everything because I am the most resilient person she’s ever known. It’s funny, I feel different when she says this, maybe because I know she knows how fragile I am. Then she tells me that ever since she heard about my cancer, she’s been thinking much more about how my father battered me, and I say, “Me too.” She says, “I feel we didn’t spend enough time on the battering.” And this makes me think of the chemotherapy battering my insides. I tell her I am very afraid of having poison inside me. And then she does what I call a Sue. She gives me back the same information I am giving her but with a genius spin, a way of seeing things that immediately and spontaneously unlocks the neurosis. In this case, she gives me a way to reframe the entire chemo experience. She says, “The chemo is not for you. It is for the cancer, for all the past crimes, it’s for your father, it’s for the rapists, it’s for the perpetrators. You’re going to poison them now and they are never coming back. Chemo will purge the badness that was projected onto you but was never yours. I have total faith in your resilience and the magical capacities of your body and soul for healing. Your job is to welcome the chemo as an empathetic warrior, who is coming in to rescue your innocence by killing off the perpetrator who got inside you. You have many bodies; new ones will be born out of this transformational time of love and care. When you feel nauseous or terrible, just imagine how hard the chemo is fighting on your behalf and on behalf of all women’s bodies, restoring wholeness, innocence, peace. Welcome the chemo as empathetic warrior.” Consciousness leap, consciousness shift. I think rain forest. I think walking into what the shamans call “the frontiers of mental death.” I think that what was terrifying and impossible two minutes ago is suddenly the thing I need to be doing most. I think yes, chemo will be my medicine. I will ride it like a lion. I will let it do its work in me. I know that whatever happens, will be what is required.