would you, could you

nine digits?
cleft palate?
missing an ear?
an arm?
two arms?
both eyes?
has one grandparent who is bi-polar?
has two parents with downs?

could you?
would you?

two separate questions, maybe,
for some.

the same question for others
with the same answer.

how about taking a child who’s mother had cancer
and whose father is clinically depressed?

what then?

it’s become clear to me that there’s a chance
i wouldn’t even take my own child.

maybe.

how sick is that?

—–

yes, we’re filling out our adoption application,
all 126 pages of it…or at least it feels that way.

if any of you are ethnically diverse, we’d love to take
a picture with you, so that prospective birth mothers
think we’re progressive.

and if you’re good at gardening, maybe you can make
our grass turn green in the denver summer heat
so that our house looks PERFECT!

yes, i’m having trouble “selling” us.
i was never good at selling anyway,
which is why i got out of corporate america
years ago.

how can i not have trouble when everything i’ve been told
says that the only things i really want to say:

that leanne had cancer, that we lost a baby,
that we lost any chance of ever making
a baby again,

are not things i should be saying.

—–

lydia has been asking questions,
and so we’ve been answering.

leanne: i can’t have any more babies in my belly.
lydia: why not?
leanne: because my eggs are bad.
lydia: you can have my eggs, mommy.

—–

lydia takes scarves.

she takes stuffed animals from her basket
and hauls them upstairs to our bedroom in the morning
and deals them out on the floor.

then she takes leanne’s scarves
and folds them into small blankets
for her babies - the pink teddy, the brown bear
i grew up with, the chicken from martha,
her monkey, her lamb.

we watch from the bed as she arranges each of them on the floor
and lays a blanket over them.

i’m taking care of my babies, she says,
and we smile and look at the babies,
and wish we had one for her right now.

her ability to nurture is a marvel,
as beautiful as the scarves,
the scarves that people sent
when lee’s hair fell out.

incidentally…

“we’re going to go to the cemetery, where great grandpa is in the ground,
and there’s going to be a stone in the ground with a cloth on it. when we
get there, you’re going to take the cloth off, ok? under the cloth will be his name.
and we’ll say hello to him, and then we’ll say goodbye, ok?”

“in the ground?” lydia said.

“uh huh”

“and when do we see him?”

“see him?”

“i want to see his face,” she said.

“we don’t see his face,” i said. “we only see the stone with his name on it and the dirt.”

——

that was sunday, when you could smell h and s bakery
in the baltimore air and the trees at the cemetery were heavy
with mulberries.

i said goodbye to leanne’s grandfather, a grocer, a carver
of turkeys, an arranger of pickle trays, a wearer of guayaberas,
a drinker of warm red wine from a box, a man who prefaced half
his sentences with “incidentally”.

but on saturday, we went to visit one of leanne’s friends
who has an old sink in their garden and a purple trim
all the way around.

incidentally,
she and her husband just lost her baby at 38 weeks.
this was the baby that grew in a test tube.
this was the test tube that held her husband’s sperm.
this was the sperm that was unfrozen.
this was the sperm that was frozen…
twenty years ago…
before he had cancer.

and here’s the thing:

you’d think i’d know exactly what to say
(at least i thought i should know exactly what to say)
having just been through something similarly haunting,
the frayed twine of cancer and pregnancy knotted and woven
between us all,
but i didn’t.

in fact, i felt more inept in my ability to console
than at any other time i can remember.

instead i was quiet, the worst thing to be.

we went out to a restaurant that somehow had stopped
serving breakfast, but wasn’t yet serving lunch,
and all sat hungry, talking about the entrees
of loss we had all been served.

and later, back at their house, jittery from too much coffee,
they showed us the baby room, the footprints and handprints,
a dining room table full of a hundred cards,
and a throwaway, brightly-colored photo album,
full of pictures of them with their lifeless daughter,
her skin yellowed and blued and bloated,
her face, the only one not paralyzed
with an open-mouthed and skeletal grief
that was obviously there before and after
the shutter had clicked.

—–

sometimes i wonder about this blog.
if maybe it has done no good at all.

weeks ago, carley had given us an article in the new yorker
about a stillbirth. and in it i had read about a man, a woman,
and the daughter they lost. and i remember that when i read it,
i had thought about our friends, and that i had been able to maybe,
just maybe, be there with her when she had to push a dead baby
out of her, when they had to pry her hands off of her daughter
because she was literally starting to fall apart.

i wasn’t there, but i was as close as i could get.

i told her this after breakfast.
that maybe for a moment, she wasn’t alone.
even if it was a moment that never truly existed.

and then i thought about here, this, right now.
this blog.
and how maybe, if i’ve done anything, i’ve given
you a chance like the author of that story gave me:

a chance to not be alone,
a chance to not leave someone else alone.

—–

at the cemetery, lydia wouldn’t touch the footstone,
but she would pick mulberries with me
and while she stuffed her mouth with them
i looked at the ground at all the ones that had fallen -
deflated and blackening on the grass.

incidentally, there was a time
when i thought leanne would be here,
and that we’d be here for her,
under us and the sky and the mulberries and the ground.

instead she was waiting for us in the car.

when lydia climbed over into her car seat,
she left purple stains on the fabric
that can’t go away.

the writing on the wall

we spent monday meeting with adoption agencies.

we met a woman who runs an agency and who
adopted two kids - one is 18 and about to graduate,
the other is 15 and in jail.

she said she wouldn’t trade either for anything.

she was sweet…and she said it kind of ends up being that the more you spend
the quicker you may be able to get a baby.

she rationalized it by saying that agencies that spend more
on marketing have bigger pools of birth mothers.

and while it made sense, i couldn’t help
feeling that she was selling babies.

—–

leanne knows a woman who adopted a little boy.
it’s an open adoption. they see the birth mother once a year maybe.
the last time they saw her, she had tattooed the boy’s name
across her back.

—–

one thing we don’t know is what to say about us.

i know that sounds ridiculous coming from someone who has
written about us for the past year.

but there’s this:

we are encouraged to tell the potential birth mothers
what led us to adoption.

we could say cancer.

and i could just see a woman cringing at our application,
not wanting their child growing up in a house that has the “c” word in it.

you’re not going to dissuade me on this.

sure, there could be a woman or two who think that we’re deserving,
i suppose, but not likely.

and yet it’s not something i want to hide
(i know this comes as no surprise to anyone, but
secrecy is not my strongpoint).

—–

we went to another agency and sat in the waiting room.
on the wall were pictures of happy families with their adopted children,
black and white, washed in overexposed light.

i realized that i’m not sure we have any recent family pictures,
pictures where leanne is not bald.

i will fix that.
now.

but i saw something else:
that there was one space on the wall where a picture was missing,
just the naked nails, elbowing out of the drywall, and the empty
canvas of the wall.

i wondered what they did to get taken down.

when the jews go to church

last night the moon grew and we got gussied up.
i shaved, leanne did her hair, and liddy put on a dress
and the jews went to church…

to hear leanne’s oncologist (the one who posted on this blog)
sing.

we sat in the last row, fed liddy butterscotch after butterscotch,
let her draw chickens with broken legs on the donation envelopes,
and let the chorale set in,
an audience of bluish tiles applauded behind them,
a window to the right serving as a viewfinder to the cutout mountains,
backlit and black.

and though i’m listening to the songs; sometimes i feel
like a motherless child, how water under snow is weary,
the waters and the wild, the distances between a roof and sky,
leonardo dreaming of his flying machine,

i hear something else in the bright
and brooding voices swabbing the canvas of night
and wonder if it’s simple replacement.

long days in the hospital swathed in the arpeggios of triumph,
but more frequently the staccatos of shock and then
an almost endless reverb of grief.

it is, maybe,
a trip to the marketplace where he trades
one song for another.

and when you drown
out one song for another,
i wonder if the first song, in the drowning, dies.
and if so, for how long?

the man has three children, a wife, the life
of hundreds of people in his coat pockets,
and a voice as smooth as, well, butterscotch.

i like to think we can hear it among the 40
other voices in the choir.  that it’s easy
to pick out the release of all the things he cannot
say anywhere else.

it takes him somewhere on its wing

and

we go somewhere too, and then liddy says:

is he sick?

who, i ask.

that man on the stage. he has no hair. he’s sick.

no, he’s not sick, honey. he’s just bald. he’s not sick.
have another butterscotch.

and then we’re back.

—–

at intermission i take liddy to the bathroom.
she pees in the stall, of course, and me at the urinal.
she looks at the urinal, at the red mesh drain cover nestled inside.

what’s that? she points.

it’s a drain cover….it’s, um, so that things don’t fall down the drain.

like your feenis?

yes, excatly, like my feenis.

——

there is leakage of the sublime
in church, in the church bathroom,
everywhere….

if you listen hard enough.

chain gang

I’m still waiting for more stories, people.
I know there are unfortunately a lot of you blood cancer-folk
out there. And I want a healthy pool of you to pick from.

Of course I’m riding for all of you.
Of course, but….

Make yourselves known.
I’ll raise money for you.
I’ll put you on my helmet, my pedal, my back.
I’ll put your face on my sprocket.
Hell, I’ll drag you in a cart behind my bike if need be.

And if you want to give, give here:

http://pages.teamintraining.org/rm/moabtour08/dweinshenker

one way or another

leanne had a scan a couple weeks ago.

it came back clear….crystal.

each time this happens it’s less and less
remarkable.  and that’s fine.  that’s good.

but while she was in the petscan,
she thought she heard a song.
blondie.

she couldn’t tell if she was just hearing it in her head,
or if it was actually playing in the chamber, really low.

“one way or another, i’m gonna find ya,
i’m gonna get ya get ya get ya get ya…..”

crap, i said. you were thinking about the cancer?

no, she said. i was thinking about a baby.

—–

leanne’s been thinking about babies a lot lately.
and right around the time of the petscan she stopped
taking the pill…

to see if her cycles might comply and kick in.

within three nights, she was having night sweats.

the day the petscan came back clean we had her blood hormone levels checked.

they came back not so good.

so….it was another day of crying,
me picking her up from work and taking her to get soup
and weeping into paper napkins,
of getting her hopes up and then having them steamrolled.

we can’t do this anymore.
i think she knows this too.

so we officially started looking into adoption.

one way or another.

it’ll give us something to blog about.

——

on another note….

whoops, i’ve done it again.

i signed up for another 100 mile bikeride to raise money
for the leukemia/lymphoma society.

but this time, i want to ride for someone else.

do you have blood cancer?
would you be my honoree?

when i find someone, i’ll post a story about you
and a way for people to donate.

let me know and i’ll ride for you.

ten, being the worst

i haven’t written
because i am under the assumption that our life
with or without cancer
(but especially without)
is not all that interesting
(to you)

certainly not any more interesting than anyone else’s life
with or without cancer.

but when events with cancer do happen,
and yes, even in remission, they happen
all the time,
i will write.

————

i keep telling leanne to write down her patient stories,
though i’m the one who likes to write around here.

the other day she had a holocaust survivor come in.
i think it was shoulder pain
or back pain, or something like that.

and she probably asked him to describe the injury,
to take off his shirt (where she saw the tattoos
left over from the concentration camp),
to move his arm or his back
this way, and then that way,
and then like this.

and then she asked him the question
that she probably asks every patient:

“so, how would you rate your pain
from 1 to 10 with 10 being the worst
pain you can imagine?”

in my head he laughed.
(she said that weeks after, he came in again,
after a car accident, smiling, saying of the woman who hit him:
what do you do? she didn’t mean to).

and as he laughed,
leanne caught herself too.
the absurdity of the question
posed to him.

the quantity and intensity of pain
this man has endured over his lifetime…
and where does the twinge of a shoulder
fit in this equation?

how would she answer it
if and when someone posed it to her?

i’m sure she thought of that too.

and then…

she came home.

beatdown #2: complete.

may beatdown #3 be a hangnail.

and may you never hear about any of this nonsense again.

flor de calabaza

“i think you’re wrong,” lydia said to me
the other morning, after the first night of leanne
being back in the hospital.

“about what?”

“about mommy coming home,” she said.

“no, i’m right,” i said. “she’s coming home.”

it’s been days now and she’s not getting better.
in fact, people are starting to get worried.

and so it’s me and liddy, together at home,
sometimes friends stopping by, but mostly
just me and her.

and let me just say that in some ways you’re never truly a father
until the day you sit in the bathroom with your daughter
collecting stool samples together.

and strangely, amidst all of this, things have been fairly normal.
and that’s what scares me.
how unaffected she seems, and i seem, by all of this.

in a way it’d be easy to say that we’ve adapted,
and i suppose that’s exactly what it is.
but what does that mean?

that she’s used to her mother being sick.

i don’t like it.

—–

i think i remember the place.
a small taco stand where the woman was making
tortillas hecho de mano.

i could be wrong, it could’ve been here,
a salad i made, anything really.

but i think for some reason it was that taco stand.
the little bowls of salsa and mushrooms and, yes,
flor de calabaza, with little spoons.

how the woman filled the tortillas with the chopped
up squash blossom, and how (yes, i’m sure i’m too much a lousy poet
to let this go), how the blossom opened inside of leanne.

—–

it’s been too long now.
too long to have a fever.
too long to not eat.
too long for it just to be e. coli maybe.

and, as i wrote before, she’s not getting any better yet.

—–

i took lydia to see her yesterday.
i made her promise not to try and hug her or kiss her,
that she had to wear a gown and gloves and that we had
to leave quickly.

“do you think you can do that?” i asked.
“yes”

and so we went and i wrapped her up in the ridiculously large
yellow gown and walked her into the hospital room
where leanne was feverish in the bed.

she sat in a chair and watched the tv.
her one transgression: a kiss on the knee
before we left.

and that was it.

—–

—–

last january: cancer
this january: e. coli
do not think it hasn’t crossed my mind that next january
i should start a new blog titled:
follow lingling as she gives genital warts a beatdown.
or an ear infection.

oh, how lovely that would be.

i want people to know how much i hate this.
how much i hate having something to write about.
how indulgent i think it is.
how disgusted i am by it (but how writing is the only thing
i know how to do that will make me feel any better).
how i’m exhausted by the life and death of it all.
how i want to live in the trivial for a while.
just a while.

how i want so desperately for lydia to be wrong,
and for me to be right about her coming home
and staying there.

doubletake

so many things tell me this is a dream.
there’s the orderly with the very, very long hair, pushing
a cart.  the valets joking in the parking lot, kicking the slush,
but most of all it’s the man in the waiting room
running around behind tables and chairs and couches
stacked with faux-italian leather purses.

there are neon green ones with a fake iguana print,
and pink ones with rhinestones
(because, well, that’s how they roll in venice, of course).

and the man who is hawking them in the waiting room
of the hospital has what i’m sure
is a european accent as fake as the things he’s selling.

it’d be easy for me to say:  what are YOU doing here?

but instead i ask:  what are WE doing here?

——

the truth is that leanne has been sick
since the day we got back from mexico.
10 days of fevers that just won’t go away.

she had a petscan last week, just the regular one,
that was perfectly clean, so it’s not a cancer thing…
in that it’s not that she has cancer.
but it may be a cancer thing in that she has something
that just won’t go away…that her immune system simply
is shot.

it’s impossible for me not to think of the woman
i wrote about a few posts ago, who made it through chemo,
only to die from some weird side effect of the chemo.
and it’s impossible for me not to hate having to be back
with leanne in the hospital again, having her being stuck
with needle after needle, having to tell lydia again that mommy
is sick and won’t be home tonight, having to park the car outside
the hospital and walk the same walk through the snow i did
a year ago.

i hate every step, every elevator, every thermometer beep.

——

i couldn’t take leanne into the hospital this morning.
i had a meeting…for work.
the meeting was for kaiser.

of course.

they were interested in health applications of digital storytelling.

of course.

and so before i came home to take leanne to the hospital,
i stood in front of a room full of health care employees,
trying to tell them how important stories are.

and, to illustrate the point, i brought up this blog on the screen.
i showed the post i wrote about leanne’s oncologist,
and i read what he wrote on the blog in response.

and in the back of the room, in the last row actually,
sat a woman from oncology who worked with us when leanne was sick.
she worked with the nurses and the doctors and the people
who got leanne into the clinical trial.

she was there for everything, all the stories.
and there she was again, at the back of the room.

——

i want to play jeopardy where what is going on now
is the answer.

and i want somebody to give me the question,
the question to which all of this is the answer.

is it
what is coincidence?
or
what have we done?
or
can you love?

——

i’m back from the hospital now.
finally, after 10 days, there is an answer:

e. coli

“there is no treatment,” says the doctor. “most people recover.”

most people recover, i say to myself.

and then i almost start laughing
at the whole thing - how we’re back in here
almost exactly one year later, leanne crying in a hospital bed,
me writing on my computer, sometimes holding her hand,
sometimes not.

the walk through the hospital with it’s faux purses,
across the slushy parking lot alone,
driving to pick up lydia
and explain why mommy won’t be home tonight,
and who knows when.
how i assuage her with the notion of a strawberry milkshake
and how right now we watch a movie together
to distract ourselves from what is happening,
from what is not happening -
leanne picking at a salad,
playing candyland on the rug,
sneezing in threes or fours or fives.