The Crystal’s Gone Dark
[For those who don’t hold the 1939 “Wizard of Oz” close to their hearts as one of the greatest movies of all time, that’s what Professor Marvel told Dorothy when she asked him to predict her future.]
I broke into Medium in January, 2020, with a piece about living with an incurable, progressive cancer and realizing that I was indeed dying.
January, 2020. Two years ago. I’m still here, still living with an incurable, progressive cancer, still dying.
Publishing that piece was a heady experience and this is a belated thank you to all of you who read it, clapped for it, and followed me. In the flush of the moment, I saw a string of articles scrolling out of my pen. I even produced three more, the last of which appeared here in January, 2021. Hardly a stellar output, I realize, but hey, it was something.
And then the crystal ball went dark.
My writing stopped for lots of reasons (or excuses, depending on how self-critical I am being). Covid, my workload, my workload and the impact of Covid on it (Zoom mediations? Sure, why not?), world disorder, the continuing creep of my incurable, progressive cancer, climate change, January 6. Pick any one of those, or several of them, but the end result was the same.
Except for letters with longtime friends, I stopped writing, period. My blog postings in 2021? Eight. Eight. Poetry output? About zero. The poetry group I belonged to collapsed from Covid and Zoom and bad feelings.
My desire to write?
Flatlined.
And then I retired.
My last day was Christmas Eve, 2021. I retired because despite loving my job, my health was tanking, not in dramatic, sweeping ways, but in little, stupid ways.
It was like being nibbled to death by mice. Little tiny mice.
So I finally followed through on what I had announced earlier and handed in my official resignation. There was a pang, but not a big one. It was time. It was past time.
The last day came and went. (I work for the county, so it was a holiday.) And then I waited. Waited for the dust to settle. Waited to see if my desire to write would come back.
I thought maybe I’d lost it. I thought maybe it was gone forever. But it wasn’t. It was just sitting back, watching and waiting.
So I’ve set aside that crystal ball that went dark. (Or did it?) I’m writing again, word by word, sentence by sentence. I’m rusty. I have never tested the adage that once you learn to ride a bike, that knowledge never leaves you but you might be wobbly if you haven’t ridden for a long time. I wouldn’t know about bikes, as they are off limits in my cancer world, but if writing has any similarities to riding a bike, only time will tell. Yeah, I kinda sorta remember how to tap into that desire, but it’s going to take a bit to get there.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m still dying, but the uptick in my overall physical well-being is so significant since retiring that my doctors can see it. The longer I live, the more I have come to agree with the philosopher Montaigne, who wrote: “Let us deprive death of its strangeness. Let us frequent it, let us get used to it…I want Death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening.”
I’m planning my 2022 garden. Yes, I’ll be planting cabbages again.
And I’ll be writing.
