I loved the first season of Survivor. We watched it, I think, when Graham was barely five. It was about the time we forced marched him along the Wissahickon Creek. Maybe we’d just moved to Philadelphia, or maybe we were in Belchertown. Anyhow, it was exciting to see people who would never choose to be stranded on an island in the Pacific try their best not to be voted off their team. Off the island. I remember one contestant who was a big guy, not in good shape but full of gumption and good cheer.
The water in the place they were was clear blue, the fish orange, the trees sweet rustling palms. It was paradise. I can’t remember if the fellow I liked was voted off. He may have been, and we were sad. We were rooting for him for weeks. The people who failed always showed up on a morning talk show a day or two later. I don’t know what the timing of the show was, how many weeks had passed since we watched what was happening each Friday? Sunday? the show aired.
The banished contestants always spilled a few secrets, or didn’t. But our favorite must have ended up on his feet, several pounds lighter, tanned, convinced that it was the kind of experience that makes you a stronger person. And maybe even rich.
***
I am sleeping in my son’s bedroom. He doesn’t live here anymore. He’s all grown up, and Scott uses this room as his office. But I’m here for months. Night after night of something that feels like twilight. Just on the edge of sleep but, really, daydreaming I’m asleep. The light seeping through the paper shade. The hum of cars racing in a circle around the museum. The eyelids of night, flickering. I can only sleep on my left side when I sleep at all, and this is the side that doesn’t dip into dreams or blissful sleep. Soon I have a hole in my ear that won’t heal. Soon I’ll feel as if I’m here forever on the hard bed in the small room where beyond the windows people are telling their cars goodbye. Carrying their packages, knitting their fingers together in thought.
***
I found out I had ovarian cancer not long after we came home from our long walk in France at the end of the pandemic. I suppose the walk was like passing through time. The rivers of rocks we stumbled along, the ancient terraces where people cultivated food thousands of years ago. Rubber irrigation hoses crossed and recrossed the paths on the way down into the Tarn River valley. I was thirsty, so thirsty. And the village was miles away down a steep cliff. We could see the stone buildings, the little curved bridge, the winding road, but we were hours away. I didn’t know the months when we got home would be filled with scans, doctor’s visits, chemo infusions, bandages that couldn’t come off. Just the run of the mill disorder when you’re sick. I’d only been a witness before to someone else’s illness.
The walk I’d wanted to do for forty years was the trek Robert Lewis Stevenson describes in his book Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes. In the early 1980s, English writer Adam Nicolson retraced (sort of) the route Stevenson and his donkey Modestine took over 100 years before. We followed the short cuts Nicolson took. It was a grand adventure.
Scott and I turned around on the first day, cut off by seven-foot drifts of snow. We were convinced we might die as the wind surged across the barren green lentil fields, piling the snow in the track. Everywhere we looked it was completely deserted. There was no cell phone service. We thought we’d be hiking through spring flowers. A freak storm in April, people told us. It’s never like this.
In the little village where we abandoned the path even the Romanesque church was locked.
Our first night back on the trail we slept in Myriam’s house, one of the B&Bs along the route, tucked in with other fairly-new houses on the edge of a tiny town park in La Bastide-Puy Laurent. When we arrived, she was potting up plants on her patio. She had a magic dog who slept near the wood stove and a husband who came in late at night and snored like a bear in the room next to ours. We didn’t meet him in the morning. We slept in her grown-up children’s room with fuzzy red blankets and woven charms on the walls. The smooth banister led us up the stairs to our room under a crossbow hanging on the wall. Scott was sure Myriam was a witch, a good witch.
As we said goodbye, she gave me a red rose she snatched from the vase on her kitchen table and tucked it into my shoulder strap. And then she gave me a hug. I wore the rose for most of the walk, through sleet and rain and wind and baking sun. And even when we walked over Mt. Lozere past the ancient rough granite monoliths that led the way up and then down over the pass to the village below, I had no inkling I was sick. Or did I—I asked the seven-foot-tall stones to suck all the bad stuff out of me as I walked step by step up the hill. Other walkers over the years, some with donkeys, had made ruts in the heather, but we were all alone.
On our way down we passed through a wilderness of larks. Too many to count above the ancient pastures on the other side of the mountain. There was a stone shed and then a farmer driving a pickup on the track from the next valley. The larks were throwing themselves into the air and singing their hearts out. It’s just what they do. I had seen them once before like this in Shetland in the boggy part of a pasture where sheep and their lambs were grazing. Here the larks were shooting up into the sky, pure flares of song.
***
Scott wants me to watch the last season of Fringe. I was traveling that year, out of my own time. Walking on a spooky road in Denmark past a shuttered asylum. But I’m not sure I want to be tricked by the timelines in that show. I’m doing my own Fringe story here. Not quite the same person I was when I came home from France after that walk in the Cevennes. Not the same person at my wedding or the same person at Graham’s birth, not the same person at my mother’s death or the person who left my father in the hospital with my brother and sister to get on a train spattered with rain, south to my husband and child. How important is it to pick up all those old pieces of the story to keep on going in the new one?
***
When I came home from the hospital that November after my surgery, my workroom was covered with pieces of the book I’m writing about New Zealand artist Anna Caselberg. She died in 2004 from cancer. I lived in her house for several months in 2019.
There were copies of Anna’s letters, reviews of her few shows, a list of exhibitors in a show of “The Group,” a catalogue of fellow artist Robin White’s work. A book about Rita Angus, a New Zealand artist just now getting attention for her work. Two books by artist Celia Paul. My notes on women and the history of art. Notebooks I filled in New Zealand about the natural history of the Otago Peninsula where Anna lived.
So many pieces were waiting for me. But I couldn’t look at any of them. Instead, I swept the papers into a pile and put them into a basket under my desk. I stacked the books against the wall. I didn’t have the energy to write. I was naïve, I guess, to think that I would.
I had months ahead of me when I struggled through each day to make it to the next. Now those days and nights are a blur, mixed together in the eternal winter of that time.
The smell nightmares of Febreze after I came out of the hospital.
The gathering of faces by my bed just before they wheeled me away to the operating room, a resident with a sweet smile and snazzy glasses, her series of braids cascading down her back, the anesthesiologist called McNulty, his hands spotted with freckles, his arms covered in red fuzz. He could care less that my grandmother’s name was Nulty.
The warm thin white blankets that appeared from blanket ovens and swaddled my body there, and, later, when I’m rotated in machines and moved along a flat metal bed into an arch with metal sides.
Hooked to several towers of fluid dripping, dripping into my arm. In first one room, intensive care, and then the next, mini-intensive care. The first where they warmed my body after twelve hours chilled, with three doctors and their teams splitting my body open like a fish and cutting out uterus, ovaries, fallopian tubes, sections of my stomach and liver, long cords of my intestines, useless all of a sudden, and anything else that might be cancerous. Plastic tubes of hot air that the nurse swept away and then wrapped me in the blankets.
We got everything, my surgeon told me later. And later Dr. Morgan appeared. I don’t remember him telling me that I had a route from my stomach through my colon to an opening near my belly button, something they saved during the operation.
This meant that I would have a plastic bag that filled with poop attached to my stomach for almost five months. But then I just knew I was connected to all sorts of things, and my body wasn’t really doing anything without a bag. There were tubes running from my stomach and my urethra and my side.
It was terrifying in the hospital bed. I couldn’t move really, my legs were wrapped with plastic that filled and emptied with air every few seconds. I wasn’t sleeping, but yet I was. There were two clocks where there really was only one that looked like a schoolroom clock. Dark patterned butterflies covered the wall.
The smell seeped into my brain and slept there. But I was strangely calm in this terror, not claustrophobic, although I should have been. Maybe it was the drugs. It took me days to get them out of my system. Everyone who came by said, you’re doing great. Graham and Scott appeared and then disappeared. For a while I couldn’t speak, or I thought I was talking, but the words were not anything the nurses could understand.
I started walking, leaning against the IV tower not long after I was moved to the mini-intensive care. A physical therapist walked with me, and then, after a day or so, I walked with one of my nurses, Jared, who was finishing a training program at Drexel.
“And then you’ll go to med school?”
“Yes,” he said. His arms were strong and covered with tattoos.
He’d had another life before this one. When I wanted to take a sponge bath, he would fill the plastic basin up and then get towels and washcloths and say, I’ll be back. When I was discharged, he offered to push my wheelchair into the parking garage, and he gave me a big sweaty hug.
By the time it was Thanksgiving I could eat, a dinner with turkey, folded twice, mashed potatoes and lemonade.
Somehow what was coming out of my stomach made its way to a plastic jug on the floor and the nurses would empty it.
Everything I ate was going into a bag when I left the hospital. The bag was attached to my stomach where my surgeon had sculpted an ileostomy.
I felt guilty struggling with the whole idea—some people live their lives dealing with the bag. The brochures I had showed men swimming, women shopping, all smiling. You can do anything you would normally do, just make sure you have a duffle packed with supplies and extra clothes if you go out with friends.
***
We went to Giverny after our walk in the Cevennes. My legs were swollen. I had a hard time walking, but I didn’t want to tell Scott. I’d waited years to see this garden. We took the train from Paris and got off with lots of other tourists. The shuttle buses were all crowded, and we waited for a while before we could get on one. It was hot, and strange to be listening to English after weeks of French conversations. But I was happy to be there. It was late April, and the garden was full of tulips. And everything was so bright. And so small in a way. I imagined the main garden as huge, but it was three aisles and three beds, and the central walk festooned with roses later in June. Nasturtiums in July. It wasn’t as crowded as I imagined it would be. Most of the people on the buses were in the gift shop or peering from windows in Monet’s house. Waving and shouting to their companions below.
We took the tunnel to the waterlily garden across the road. I had pictured his garden in the country. The pond, like the garden, looked so much smaller than I’d imagined it. The green bridge arched across the greenish water. The water lilies just starting to grow. A narrow rowboat moored on the edge of the pond. And I was on the verge of dying and I didn’t know it. Dramatic, isn’t it?
We missed all the shuttle buses so we took a path along the river to see if we could catch a local bus on the way back to the train. It was hot. My legs were so painful I thought I couldn’t walk another step, and I was hoping we wouldn’t have to walk all the way back to the train. But I was happy to have seen the garden. The way the colors of the spring flowers blazed, the dashes of white. It was so alive. We couldn’t catch it with our cameras.
***
Information sifts through my mind like blowing sand, some stuck like a crust in the corner. We saw a bright lemon/orange bird this morning on Lemon Hill. A place where there was once a large greenhouse filled with lemon trees.
A Baltimore oriole, Scott tells me later when he looks it up on his Merlin bird app. A beat-up white car was pulled up on the grass, faced into some bushes. One of the park workers told Scott the car was a nuisance complaint. They want to make the park safe for the neighborhood.
“He might be homeless,” I said.
“Or sick,” Scott said. He talked to the workers who have a new machine to grind up stumps. I watched the chimney swifts dart and swirl above the burned-out grass. Probably a hatch of insects.
***
I’ve been trying to call Anna Caselberg to life as I type the pages of the book about her. Maybe if I could talk to her daughter, maybe if I knew what books she read, what she liked to drink, what her favorite fruit was. Maybe if I could see more photos of her and of John, her husband, maybe if I could touch a book that was hers. Maybe if I knew what she understood after painting image after image sparked by the hills of Otago, the swirl of water in the bay, the swish of little waves on the shore below her house.
Sometimes I forget that I’ve been so sick like when I’m talking on a video call to the woman who tells me everything I’ve found out about Anna might be wrong somehow. Bridie, a friend of Anna’s once. Might be not quite what I think. I don’t even know what color her hair was or how she smiled. What kind of perfume she wore or how she liked her eggs, if any. I don’t know if she covered her windows with curtains, or licked her lips in surprise. If she held John’s hand tightly when they walked down the streets of Dunedin buying groceries and candles and papers. I don’t know if there were rats in the grocery store then or hawks in the bushes. Or milk in cups on the table. I can’t reconstruct much of anything yet from the spiderweb of stories I’ve been gathering. I forgot I was sick for minutes when I was talking to Bridie, and then I didn’t forget and just now when I was reading, I forgot about my feet, still strange and my hip still sore, and the way my hair has a mind of its own now that it’s back from being banished.
Did she eat apples or grapes? And what about picnics or parties or dinners out and did John really have more money than anyone thought?
I feel responsible for making something coherent and important from her life. Something true. Something to tell everyone how great an artist she was—but it’s all up to luck isn’t it, the cultivation of a following. The way my voice can never be loud enough to get through to the people who might be the most important ones to know about this.
***
I used to throw myself at the earth. I woke with that thought. Now I’m not so sure about that. Do I really want to climb mountains to feel the wind that circles the earth? Now that I’ve been split apart and sewed back together again and doused with chemicals, do I just want to pay attention to the garden on the side of the house or the lilies unfurling on the deck? Did Anna Caselberg get to that point? Or did she always believe in the power of the hills she painted across the harbor?
***
When we came home from New Zealand the second time after a research trip, I spent days seeing doctors. I wasn’t sick. I felt great, but when the radiologist finally gave the official report of the CT scan, it wasn’t good. I had evidence of cancer around my diaphragm. The plan is for six sessions of chemo. I’m done with the first, waiting for the next in a few days.
My hair is in a nest on my head. It falls like thread from my head to the slippery floor of the shower. I’m feeling reassured even though I know soon I won’t have any hair at all. Chris Evert was diagnosed with stage 1 ovarian cancer two years ago, and it was back a year later. Her scans also showed there was no evidence of disease. I’m happy that she’s once again in the clear. Chemo was easier, she tells the reporter in the Times. The second time she knew what to expect: five lost days and then almost two and a half weeks of time she could work. She’s eighty percent of what she was she tells him/her, but isn’t that great! She can still work out. I’ve never calculated how much I’ve lost, just that I’m happy I can do what I do.
Everything happened so quickly. The flight back from New Zealand. The way my hair started falling out in chunks in the shower and now is a puff of cotton candy on my head. I didn’t expect there would be a second time. I’d made it through the first after all. But here I am, the trips to the garden center to cheer me up, the clashes over nothing in the kitchen with Scott, the sitting in the chair as the drug flows into my veins, the man from China who doesn’t speak English throwing up in the wastepaper basket one chair over in the infusion center, and no one comes for minutes, and then they all appear with their little blue bags, but it’s too late. All the sick people gathered like a silent chorus, first in the waiting rooms, and then in their chairs facing the windows that look out at the city and the river and the sky.
***
A page break is also called an insert on my computer, I just discovered. It’s all part of the story. I could tell it in one big sentence like David Antin performed his “talk poems,” stories winding from page to page, or break it up in tiny pieces. I could leave white space all over the place, but I won’t. I want the thread to be a conversation, have stops and starts, don’t I? Am I showing too many of the beginnings and endings already?
But it’s a relief to be here now, about to sip my cup of tea. The cup is fanciful, magical, deer with fruit growing out of their horns, or is it blossoms? It’s all the same really.
When I first started writing the biography of Anna Caselberg, I had no idea I would have ovarian cancer three years later. Or that there’d be a pandemic and that as many as twenty-four million people would have died from Covid.
I didn’t know I would follow Robert Lewis Stevenson’s path in the Cevennes or find him again in the Marquesas sitting on a beach in Christina Thompson’s book Sea People. He was taking “a valedictory tour of the South Pacific.” This was his first stop. Stevenson wrote: “the face of the world was of a prehistoric emptiness; life appeared to stand stock-still, and the sense of isolation was profound.”
I didn’t know my hair would fall out and my skin pop away from my bones. I didn’t know the cancer would return so soon.
I didn’t know my gardens around my narrow house in Philadelphia would make me happy, blooming so courageously in such a difficult place.
***
Weeks later the smoke pours in from the Canadian fires again bathing us with haze. But I’ve been thinking of the squirrels, one large, three small, playing on the branches above my head as I sit on the deck, late afternoon. They seem to be full of joy, and tumble and leap and scramble above and below each other on the bending elm limbs. And what about the three deer with huge medieval antlers leaping through the woods as we walked along the river. Or the muskrat twirling her tail in the currents below us as we walked across the bridge. We stood with an older couple, his twisted walking stick leaning against the fence as we spied on the muskrat in the shallows.
The world is at the “tipping point.” Greenland ice melting, adding fresh water to the ocean, disrupting the balance of warm and cold. The gulf stream stuttering to a stop perhaps as soon as this year. The Times tells me that Hali Kilbourne at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Studies warns, “It is very plausible that we’ve fallen off a cliff already and don’t know it.”
Just like Al Gore’s illustrations in An Inconvenient Truth, in the Atlantic, meridional overturning circulation brings warm water from the tropics and moves through the gulf stream, past the southeastern coast of the US and bends toward Northern Europe, and then sinks to deep ocean and moves south again.
We’re all stuck with a body that performs miracles but can’t live forever, along with the battering of the planet.
During the winter when I was so sick, Scott decided he’d find some way to throw my ashes into the North Atlantic Drift and let them float to Wales.
***
There is so much spring now, spring in the dogs’ eyes, spring in the sparrows humming and flitting, spring in my arms as I pull them out to the side and embrace the air and yell. From what painter Wayne Seyb, a close friend of Anna Caselberg, has told me, she didn’t have this chance of years after her treatment.
Yes, I know. There are two stories here. One is about the painter, hardly known when she was alive. The other is about the writer. The painter has a lot of people rooting for her. Rooting for the writer to bring her alive in a way it seems like she didn’t want, or maybe didn’t want, when she was alive. Fame did not entice her.
The writer has lost almost all her hair again. This isn’t great. She knows the painter had ECT at some point. The writer is trying to find out more about this, but does it really matter for the story? On CSI Las Vegas, the murderer last night had some kind of twisted electroconvulsive therapy from an evil therapist. You could still see the scars on his temple.
Cancer has invaded this story like a flood. She wants to stay with the story of the painter. She admires this painter. She admires her persistence. And the concentration of her art. Celia Paul, another painter who had fame and then lost it for a while, and then claimed it back in her still-living lifetime, writes: “Painting is the language of loss. The scraping off of layers of paint, again and again, the rebuilding, the losing again. Hoping, then despairing, then hoping. Can you control your feelings of loss by this process of painting, which is fundamentally structured by loss?”
The writer’s work is threaded with loss. She can’t seem to get away from it, even though her life has been showered with gifts. This, she supposes, is an interlude of sorts, time passes, and the letters on the page, digital, dark, are just part of the time passing but she wants to show how very important the painter was, how powerful her brushstrokes, how she was just as good, maybe better than her father who was finally so famous, though he always wanted to be the center of attention anyway, and seemed to suck the energy out of the family, even though her mother did her best to keep it for herself and her children.
***
Margaret Renkl writes in an essay in The New York Times, “Most of the young in this yard do not live to see adulthood, for this yard, like the great world, is full of predators and other dangers.”
She explains that a Covid infection early in the pandemic keeps her housebound during the summer when her blood pressure goes “haywire,” and she has trouble breathing. She watches an armadillo, and Carolina wren, rabbits and skinks from her windows.
She writes, “I’m not anthropomorphizing here. To understand that we all exist in a magnificent, fragile body, beautiful and vulnerable at once, is not to ascribe human feelings to nonhuman animals. It is only to recognize kindship…we all have overlapping scars.
“I think the ever-present threat my wild neighbors live with tells us something about the nature of joy, the fallen world—peopled by predators and disease and the relentlessness of time, shot through with every kind of suffering—is not the only world. We also dwell in Eden, and every morning the world is trying to renew itself again. Why should we not glory in it, too?”
I know that sense of joy as we walk in the Wissahickon on the old road. Forbidden Drive is cool and damp even though the temperature almost reaches 90 later in the day. It’s our escape to the water, the creek spattered with cotton balls from one of the trees. They’re huge, the tulip trees the tallest, but sycamore too, where we hear the fluty hermit thrush and the veery. The cardinal and allies. Catbird and others. I’m ecstatic I can walk three miles past the covered bridge and the corners of the stream where we saw fishermen a couple of weeks ago. After we turn back toward the parking lot, we see a deer on the edge of the road. A woman ahead clicks her phone for a picture and the deer moves up into the bushes. We can see her climbing slowly up the steep hill, chomping on leaves.
Sharon White is the author of several books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including Vanished Gardens: Finding Nature in Philadelphia, winner of the AWP award in creative nonfiction. Her first novel, Minato Sketches, won the Rosemary Daniell Prize and is published by Minerva Rising Press. Betty Books, an imprint of WTAW, will publish If the Owl Calls, a mystery, in fall 2025. Her new collection of poetry is The Body is Burden and Delight. She is an Associate Professor Emerita at Temple University.
