I’ve spent the better part of the last ten years getting over myself. As another birthday comes to greet me, I review my uncertain and
arduous path between 47 and 57: three years
of breast cancer, diagnosis, reconstruction, and recovery; the crash of the
economy at the height of my creative career marketing products people didn’t
need; and the younger of my two daughters electing at 20 to remove herself from
our lives. It all took a sharp swipe at my ego: I was broken, inside and out. Even
if I could have mustered up another round of ‘power bitch’, it was doubtful I
had enough energy- or interest- to follow through on anything.
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| Gillian Zed January 2019 Photo by Meri Hoffsten |
Learning to be vulnerable in my late 40’s, to ask for help,
was a challenge to my stoic, self-reliant form of feminism. After a career
rising above blanket misogyny and inner-corporate drama, I no longer had the
sanctuary of my professional setting to hide in. My group of adoring clients, my
network of collaborators, essentially paid to agree with me, that was...... ALL GONE.
I had to make friends.
I had to join support groups. There
was just no way in hell I was going to get through all that shit alone. Being a
strong, independent, and superior woman had brought me that far, and then,
unceremoniously dumped me at the doorstep of humanity. My talent as a copy
writer was shot. With no ability to concentrate, I couldn’t string together
words in the clever ways I once could. (You can still find one of my tag lines printed on product packaging in some
dusty gift shop.) Work as a potential art director or photography stylist, even
if the gig wasn’t physically strenuous, left me deeply apathetic and
indifferent to potential customers. I was no longer engaged with all that ephemera
I'd built a career launching into the marketplace with my proven, unique vision.
I just didn’t care. I wanted to. But that broad was gone. She
had checked out somewhere between the third breast surgery and my kid moving
away without a forwarding address. I was struggling with trying to figure out who was this shell of a woman that remained?
After a move east for my partner’s job,
<Side note soap box and shout out of appreciation to R. for working the
‘square job’ that provides our financial stability and health care, including the
routine mammogram that saved my life with early detection. Because it was not
on my radar, or family history, I wouldn’t have elected to pay for this basic screening
at 47, therefore it’s doubtful the cancer would have been discovered before
becoming potentially deadly. That very practical reality -having reasonable,
preventative based health care/insurance- is a blessing- a privilege- I am acutely
aware of. Every. Single. Day.>
I took a job at a quaint little New England soap store and
became a 48-year-old shop girl. That was until the first Massachusetts winter.
Then, just months out of my last reconstruction surgery, I played the recovery
card, and began a tradition of going somewhere warm – or just warm-er - for
January. To get away. To heal. And, hey, maybe I’d write. I kept it affordable
by hitting up friends and family for house or pet sitting gigs, lucking out
with locations.
Over this last decade, during those weeks alone with my
thoughts, walking on a beach in San Diego, watching the rain from a Seattle brownstone,
I’ve sorted through the junk drawer of my emotional clutter. With my new
perspective – eminent mortality - it seemed I’d saved all the wrong mementos
and discarded the snippets of joy that DID exist in my life’s story. When looking
back I’d chosen to focus on the areas where I believed I had failed, came up
short, disappointed others, myself or simply did not achieve the lofty goal I
had set for myself. Having been so accomplished in seeing the potential in
others, my clients, my children, I assumed there was nothing for me beyond
that. I was defined by making other people successful. Not myself.
I did write during my winter sojourns, and other trips tucked
into the year when I could. I began to write about subjects that affected my
world, tore at my heart, made me want to help, to change society: I wrote stories
about people I admired for their ability to be who they were, authentic in themselves,
unapologetically. Having been given a second chance on life, I wrote about the
person I wanted so badly to become. I wrote for myself, publishing a short
story I was proud of, Pier View, on
Amazon.
In recent years, I’ve been lucky to visit Hawaii for my
January trip. I often rent a place near family in Lanikai or Kailua Beach on the
east side of Oahu and spend a few weeks writing, walking, eating good food, and
sorting through that -thankfully less crowded - emotional junk drawer. Although
far from Honolulu, there’s plenty of tourists, it’s one of the most
photographed beaches in Hawaii. The sun rising above the sea next to the
majestic Mokulua Islands is a spectacular sight; humbling.
Dawn is around 7am in the winter and sometimes I would manage
to wake up early, inspired to get down to the sand and watch mother nature do
her thing. Often, I settled into a spot far down on the beach, removed from the
tourists and tripods, sit on my towel, drink my coffee and thank the goddesses
for being alive.
But today, waiting for the glimmer of a day that will not be
held back, I feel tears rise, and alongside my gratitude, I must also again, recognize
my loss. Not my breast, not my career, not my daughter. Thinking that sequence
of events was the lowest, the worst, the place in my life that made me not only
crack open that drawer of emotional bric-a-brac, but fucking pull it out and dump
it on the floor with a clatter. That wasn’t it. It was another fat chunk of life’s
shit, dropped right into my lap. Something else had changed in the ten years
since I had vanquished breast cancer.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In 2015 my closest friend, Terri, a funny and acerbic woman
of 33, my bar stool companion during the exhausting recovery months, died. She’d
been drinking herself into seizures, eventually had a heart attack, the
resulting coma, and inevitable death. Thirty-fucking-three.
Terri had been one of the first people who loved me without obligation
or potential benefit, a true friend after
my lifetime allowing so few. I felt lucky to have her next to me while I
battled the undefined demon that was breast cancer. She did not care who we’d been in our abandoned careers, (she’d worked
for corporate at Seattle’s coffee king until the crash,) or where I’d traveled,
or what the doctors were doing for me. Terri just loved my sense of humor-
biting and sardonic like hers- we made each other laugh, which was good
medicine for both of us.
Even though we came to live far from each other, we spoke
often, (she never forgot my birthday,) yet I had no idea of the level of her
addiction, or the havoc it was wrecking on her health. Terri, of course,
omitted much in our long-distance chats, but she was never one who shared. Her
disinterest in the details went both ways, and even when I sensed something was
maybe off, I did not press.
We had been drinking buddies yes, but that time period for me
was a temporary escape. My recovery refuge. Through my naiveté or
warm-hearted blindness, I never saw
it to be the all-encompassing lifestyle of self-medicating, (and self-destructive,)
numbness it was for Terri. I’d grown up covering for my alcoholic older
brother’s relentless bouts, yet never saw the same illness in the beautiful,
energetic, young woman next to me. There was some deep pain there, but I didn’t learn about it until after she was dead. I felt responsibility for her slipping
through my fingers, for missing the signs of the depth of her crippling
addiction, believing I had ultimately failed her. As a friend, a woman, as family.
Standing over her twisted, tube fed body in the ICU, (I made
it to her side in less than 20 hours from three states away,) I recognized my
humanity then, in a way I never could have fathomed. It wasn’t that MY time
might be shortened on earth. Suddenly it was evident that those I love, even
those 20 years younger than me, also had tenuous expiration dates. Alone with
her, I sobbed, loud and snotty, clutching her lifeless, wired hand, begging her
forgiveness, gasping, over and over again, in a pleading,
begging-for-it-to-be-different voice: “I didn’t know, I didn’t KNOW.”
I shared this pain with Terri’s sister J.C., while we waited in
the hospital for the angels to come for the girl that we both knew better than
anyone else who had gathered there for good bye. J.C. herself a health care practitioner, thoughtfully looked at me, tilting her head
kindly. “Gill,” reaching across the table to touch my arm, “She didn’t want you
to know.”
I was silent.
“You would have tried to do something. She knew that,”
I was nodding vehemently now, “Then, it would have been just like me, our
parents, and everyone else. The end. Cut off. Pushed out.” I learned about a failed intervention, Terri hadn't spoken to her family in years,
I was reeling. How had I let my friend off the hook so easily
with all her bullshit excuses? Why hadn’t I pushed harder on the phone for more information about her health? I had failed. I had failed, big time.
It was almost a week of waiting. I drank more than ate, at breakfast,
lunch, and dinner and never got drunk. I rolled joint after joint and never got
high. I sat, numb and alone, in a loaned apartment, staring at the Space Needle
through the rain, waiting for the phone to ring. Sometimes, I would call my
niece, a therapist, and put her on speaker while I cried uncontrollably, rocking in
agony, and guilt. She offered insight that helped then and has stayed with me.
“Terri needed to keep that place safe, where you two could
remain close, where your love for her would be as friend and not a fixer. She loved
you enough to not want to lose you, and knew if she revealed her truth, that
would change. You were able to just be her friend, and that it what she needed
from you. Unconditional love.”
That was the same gift Terri had given to me, with her giggle and wink, for years, as I was coming through
my cloud of loss and scars and self-doubt: love
you, long time.
My focus shifted. I made sure my family- blood and chosen- knew
I appreciated them, showing them love and forgiveness. Asking for forgiveness. I wrote my lost
daughter a letter. She didn’t respond. I began calling my mother more. J.C. and I became close, sharing our best Terri memories. Like knee-buckling grief, I gradually got over the anger, the should-have-beens,
the gotta-wins. And yes, worked hard on getting over myself and the self-perpetuated
mythology of being together and in control.
So, in the last ten years: I officially ended the bloating
and mood mangling post-cancer meds, found a comfy bra solution for my
mismatched boobs and ceased bitching about it every morning, we returned to
California, and I opened a little vintage store with a beachy theme to keep me in
my happy place. And then, on that day Terri died, almost four years ago now, I
stopped drinking completely, to honor my dear friend, who, even when told it would
probably save her, could not. It’s a good way to be close to her. I do miss the
wine.
The person I was before, before all this fucking loss, was
oblivious to the pain I was operating under. Carried over from an emotionally isolated,
nomadic, and lonely childhood, I was intent on constant motion under the guise
of moving forward, even if that was not always the case. I often missed happy moments and enjoyment sprinkled among the uncomfortable reality I was avoiding.
Finally, in my mid-50’s, new lessons eventually seeped
through my grief: self-preservation is
not a healthy emotional path, you are not in charge of the universe, choose to
take care of yourself now, in a meaningful and genuine way, not out of fear.
There’s no longer an inner power struggle to be the one that has it all, to be
the best, the smartest, the strongest. I am none of those things. And I’m at peace knowing that.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Today is Terri’s birthday, I wipe away the tears and wait for a late-January dawn over the sea, setting my phone’s camera. Looking up, I see
there’s now a cluster of visitors standing in front of me, at my prime spot
that I’d invested a half hour walk into. This has happened before. A couple
years ago I would’ve cleared my throat subtly and the oblivious tourists would
look around, for the first time realizing they were not alone in paradise, say ‘oops’
or ‘sorry’ and move sheepishly out of my view. But today, there is a different
reaction inside me. I’m not pissed off. I’m not agitated by their ignorance and
selfishness. I am thankful they too, have come to see this beautiful moment. Grateful, now believing the sun will return
for me for many years ahead, and blessed to share it. Without a sound, I get up and move down the beach.
I miss my best friend. I miss my younger kid and sure, I
guess I miss my breast too. I don’t have remorse however, for the loss of my
stress-fueled career that mostly made more money for people who didn’t need it. There is no nostalgia for that bitchy broad who once resided inside me, that
knew everything and had to tell you so. I shift my gaze to a quiet future,
where I write for myself, sell my sea shells, and cherish every brunch date and
funny text with my older daughter - who somehow has learned about this self-love
shit at a much earlier age.
It is a world of commercialism and commodities. We expect so
much from our investments of time, stress and money, but so little from
ourselves. There is no optional bottom line here: you will miss out, your emotional junk drawer will fill up, making it
harder and harder to open. I don’t know how to help you do it for yourself, I
can only share what happened for me.
Cancer, unemployment, losing connection to a child- all
facilitated for me a desire to change the path that had not served me, that had
only brought me to unhappiness. I shed my self-centric thinking enough to
understand that I’m not so powerful that I can make people leave me. They do that all by themselves, for their own
reasons. I set out to be a more patient, kinder and caring human. I strive to
avoid stress at all levels in my day to day. But, Terri’s death, tragic and
preventable, was the final push for me to become present in my life. I miss her
enormously. I have, with time, shifted to mostly recalling the laughter we
shared, instead of the painful end I couldn't fix.
It’s a work in progress, sure, but I’ve accomplished changing
my stars a bit through self-love and self-forgiveness. I’ve learned that the important things can not be packaged and sold. We're
simply here to help each other, and should respect the planet that provides for
us. Ultimately, we’re all connected: by the wonder of a baby’s
first breath, the love in every family embrace, our endless devotion to animals, and the beauty of each fruit
and flower.
A decade later, now healthy, with much pain in the rear view
mirror but joyful memories to make ahead, I appreciate each morning, every dawn,
even if I don’t watch it happen. Because no one owns the fucking sunrise. It’s there
for us all to share, gratis. That beautiful gift of possibilities. Every day.
