Free A Season in Hell by Marilyn French Page B

I had to return, for another course of chemo. Seeing my dismay, the kids offered to take me to the country for the week. We drove up to the Berkshires on the day I was released, and I breathed more easily, as I always do there. But I was weak and enervated from being so long in bed without eating. There were no hikes in the mountains this time; I had only the luxury of lying on a chaise on my screened porch with the kids, surrounded by the fragrant garden, watching hummingbirds fight in the bee balm and the delphiniums, the orioles, the finches, robins, hawks, blue jays, and sparrows play.
    The morning after we arrived, I was combing my hair in front of my bathroom mirror, and a huge clump fell out into my hand. In wonder, I touched the back of my head, and another huge clump appeared in my hand.
    Losing my hair was the one side effect I had anticipated. I had shrugged it off. So what, I thought. I told my friends, I can handle that; it’s nothing. So little do we know ourselves! For when it happened, I burst into tears; I found it horrible. I felt like a leper, as if my limbs were shriveling and dropping off. Within a few days I was completely bald. I stared at myself in sorrow. In my youth, women would stop me on the street to ask what shampoo I used to get such shiny hair. We were too poor to buy shampoo, and my mother had us use Ivory Flakes, but I never confessed that to anyone. Now I realized I had taken pride in my hair, it had been a source of vanity, even though it had lost its sheen long ago. I walked around the house bald, but I covered my head when I went into public.
    One magical thing happened during the month. It was so remarkable that I recorded it in my laptop journal. The night I was readmitted to the hospital, I was restless, unable to sleep. Words from a Rilke poem kept running through my head: words spoken in an afterlife by a little boy who has died, to his living parents. In the translation I know (Randall Jarrell’s, I think), he says: “Here everyone is like a just-poured drink / But the ones who drink us I still haven’t yet seen.” The thought was transformed in my mind into a repetitive “Here everyone is just a body broken,” and I consciously appended, “and the ones who treat us see us that way.” In the hospital, brokenness had become the dominant factor of every patient’s existence.
    I found this idea comforting, which was odd, since I had spent most of my life high-handedly ignoring my body, demanding that it do what I willed it to. Yet it was somehow a relief to be reduced to mere body, as if I were a baby again, not responsible for anything, my body cared for and watched over and monitored. This was the full human-merely-human state; I could not pretend to more, hope for more. I watched skinny-legged men speed down the corridor pushing their IV poles, their hospital robes flapping behind them, their skin whiter than if they were already dead. A permanent if not constant feature of the hospital was the sound of women weeping. I would often hear a woman crying softly in a room down the hall, and a nurse would pass my door, her eyes wet.
    I could not relax that night. At last, unthinking, unaware of what I was doing, I told myself to have pleasant dreams—as my mother did every night of my childhood as I went to bed. “Good night, Marilyn, pleasant dreams,” I said to myself as she always said, and at that moment I felt her presence. She did care that I was sick, she had noticed. She had turned her attention away from herself and toward me, for a brief time, at least. I could sense her horror at my broken body and my pain, and she smoothed my brow with her hand, something she had done once in life, when I came out of surgery. I asked her to make me feel better and to stay with me until I was well. Then I was able to sleep.
    She never appeared to me again, but it was all right. I knew she knew and cared.

1992
SEPTEMBER
    A WEEK LATER, ON THE last day of August, I returned to S-K