Dear Eleanor Roosevelt
Dear Eleanor Roosevelt,
I am writing you from across seas of time
or, more specifically, from Flagstaff, Arizona.
October. 2020.
America.
I think you were the one who said “do one thing each day that scares you.”
I think that was you, right?
Well today alone, I did THREE things that scared me. Bad.
1) I weighed myself. That’s not a sexist/self-deprecating joke. Weight jokes aren’t funny. Ever. I’m losing so much weight and trying to maintain by eating potatoes and drinking those old people protein shakes. 115 today. Last year, this time? I weighed over 160 pounds (got a little chunky there for a sec). Anyway I weighed myself. It scared me, but I gained a pound.
2) I called that new gastroenterologist my oncologist recommended. My heart was beating so fast. Doctors and medical stuff scares me so much and I’ve been working very hard these last few days to manage my fear like keep it from totally destroying my spirit, you know? So I did that. And the gastro had already reviewed my medical records and will see me in December unless my Crohn’s starts going backwards again in which case she’ll see me “anytime,” and I also made this super adult pivot and asked to be placed on a “cancellation list” even though, even now, in this state, I have never in my life felt “eager to see” a doctor.
3) I called to confirm the PET scan scheduled for tomorrow that will look for cancer inside my body, more precisely, tomorrow, in my left lung.
All of it scared me, but I just wanted you to know that even though your quote has become grossly ubiquitous, I finally think I actually “get it” and why it stuck around.
When the fear — the hard, cold, gusty part — passes, you feel invigorated, more alive, like some wild animal or some mythical beast or just a bare chested woman screaming defiantly into the void.
Fear is a helluva drug.
And like almost all drugs that aren’t manufactured in a plumber’s basement, fear
is a drug that has its benefits and drawbacks
even when used responsibly or in moderation.
My fear right now is Whack-A-Mole.
My hammering skills are rusty.
Fortunately, I’m running out of quarters
and don’t have to play this game
for too much longer.
Maybe my next round of fear will be more like Pac Man.
Anyway,
Most fear, as you surely know, wiggles in from
all the cracks in what we think we know
but don’t.
Soon, I will know something, though not all the things
about my body, my country.
This Whack-A-Mole fear
will soon go away and turn into another fear
that is more like Donkey Kong or
Ski Ball. Or, if I’m lucky, air hockey.
I really do love air hockey.
But right now I don’t know.
When I pause Whack-A-Mole, I’m throwing darts
at an unmarked board that is very small.
And I have (always) really bad eyesight
and have never been
particularly good at darts.
Even the velcro ones.
I just checked the quote: do one thing everyday that scares you —
that was you.
Of course it was. I can only imagine the many things
from the time of your birth in 1844 until your death in ’62 (you didn’t
live long enough to see the shakiest parts of that decade) the things
you did every day that scared you.
Women still usually
have to do at least one thing a day that scares us
like walk to our car in a dark parking lot or check the news,
but you? You were the president’s wife, and really fucking smart at a time when people didn’t think women could be smart nor was it the role of the first lady to “be smart” and “know things” but you did, and you saw two world wars and your husband was sick as shit for most if not all of second term and there’s that joke about how you were probably America’s First Lesbian President
and it’s funny because it’s likely true.
So Eleanor, I’m looking to history — art and science and all of it — for how people
dealt with fear — this kind of fear. Your husband talked about it, too. “The only thing we have to fear . . .” Between us, I think your quote makes a bit more sense.
Because no offense to Franklin, but sometimes fear is more than just a feeling
it’s an election
or a growth.
The big fucking fear.
The not-just-a-phase not just-a-touch-of-seasonal-affect not just-having-a-moment fear but oh-my-god-I-can-feel-the-hot-stank-breath-of-the-void-on-my-face fear.
You know the kind of fear just by virtue of having existed
as a woman. You knew fear better than your husband. I’m damn near
sure of it.
Tomorrow I will have my third PET scan in about a year’s time.
Nuke med. Kind of amazing, from a scientific perspective.
They fill you up with this nuclear tracer and can look at your cells.
The warm ones are usually the ones with cancer.
They show up red.
This is why you can’t move or talk for an hour before you get the scan itself.
They ask you to be very, very quiet and very, very still so you don’t get “hot tongue.”
Seriously.
They didn’t have this kind of shit when you were around, Eleanor. It might have helped your husband. Maybe not. We don’t have polio either, but maybe that was “old news” already when you died. We have all sorts of shit now that you just wouldn’t even believe — like the internet and cell phones and coffee shops with really good fucking
coffee all over the place (you don’t have to always settle for the diner shit), and I’m
sad to report that yesterday a woman who hates women was sworn into the supreme court after a really amazing woman who was on the Supreme Court died of cancer. So women are still having to fight to be treated and seen as humans
disappointing, I know. Some good stuff has happened, too. Like I’m a lesbian (I think you were, too) and I was able to legally marry my wife. The new Supreme Court
might try to undo that to appease some really broken souls in our country, but
maybe not. There’s so much I don’t know.
Anyway, tomorrow they will fill me with nuclear tracer (which causes cancer — drugs that treat cancer cause cancer and cancer screenings cause cancer so like we could do a bit better with our medical technology, but that’s for another essay and another writer
who can intelligently navigate the world of science and medicine — I am not the one)
and I will have to sit very still in a recliner and not move or talk for an hour
at which point they will put me in a big machine where I will continue to remain
very still and very quiet for another half an hour.
Then I will go home. I will probably cry for a little, then I’ll move on with my day.
I wasn’t supposed to have anymore PET scans this year, but they found some nodules on a chest x-ray in the Emergency Room and my doctor would kind of not be doing his job if he didn’t check that shit out.
I understand. I just wish it wasn’t so. Wishes are fun, but word made action is the only thing that has ever made anything better. Or, at worst, word made action is the only thing that has ever
served up
the real, actual, truth.
Sometimes I don’t want the truth.
Sometimes I always want the truth.
Sometimes I struggle to identify the truth and have to squint.
Sometimes I ask truth if it is a Good Witch or Bad Witch.
Warts and all, we need to love truth right now.
Sometimes, the more I understand, the less afraid I feel.
And then sometimes the reverse is true.
And sometimes both are true simultaneously.
Sometimes the truth is Schroedinger’s Cat, right?
Or is this why I don’t grasp physics and am mostly bad at algebra
and really suck at Geometry, and also maybe why I do not make
a six figure salary, and probably never will despite
my good work ethic and student debt (yes, still!) and publications
and nominations and terminal degree?
Anyway, they’re going to scan my cells with nukes.
I’m sure this is not technically correct, but it sounds more metal to describe the procedure this way. Scanned With
Nukes isn’t a half bad
band name either.
So. There’s hope. There’s hope that nothing in my body has changed. That the
breast cancer has just stayed put. In its lane, as the kids would say. Or maybe the breast
cancer has moved. Maybe to my lungs. Maybe somewhere else.
Or maybe not at all.
Inside me, a kind of Shroedinger’s Malignancy.
For now.
And inside our country, too,
there’s hope that Trump will lose this election.
And that some of the really
broken folks will just crawl back under their rocks and hide their
hard hearts forever or heal and change
with the rest of us.
There’s hope that the statues will turn to dust — you
know which ones I’m talking about and I am not debating this with you anymore, America —
There’s hope that compassion and kindness and generosity
will become important again, or at the very least, cool.
Maybe there’s hope
that we can make empathy and intention
the new normal in the new America.
Eleanor, can America ever be new again? I really would love your thoughts on this matter.
Eleanor, I have to think you’d agree with me on most matters pertaining to our nation. I like to think we’d get along, had we ever met.
You were one of those amazing fucking people.
Rare bird. Shooting star.
But not a candle in the wind (what an embarrassing metaphor. Sorry, Elton, but I really think you could have done Lady Di one better . . .)
Princess Diana, anyway, was just a story we told ourselves about a person.
You were a force. Nothing timid or frail about you, though I know you
surely had your moments you just didn’t have them in front of Barbara
Walters or whatever.
You died of tuberculosis like virtually every person of your generation seemed to (that or, as in the case of your husband, Polio). My great-grandmother died of tuberculosis in her twenties. Had something like five kids. Died at home in their house on the northside of Chicago by the big German cemetery. I know
almost nothing about her, but that her name was Katherine and
my great uncle Richard was still in diapers when his mother died
and my grandmother was seven. And she never really got over it.
She didn’t talk about it much, but you could just feel that something
broke for her when her mother died of tuberculosis and she was seven
and it was winter in Chicago and they had no money and dad was
drinking way too much.
But the thing about my grandmother, Eleanor, was that even though she got banged up by life (we all do, we all do), she was still a nice person. She was good at parties. Liked
glittery things and reading Cosmo and talking about making food.
And she loved me ridiculously.
She didn’t even try to keep it on the d.l. that I was the “favorite” grandchild.
It was an open secret.
It wasn’t even a secret.
Her name was Terese. She died of dementia when I was thirty. My middle name is Terese, after her, and I am happy for that.
Some nights, when I lived nearby in my early twenties,
after my grandpa had died, I’d come over to my grandma’s
with beer and fried chicken
and we’d talk in the living room and watch television
and back then, I was a cigarette smoker, and she let me smoke
in the house because she didn’t want me to “get cold outside.”
She was a good woman. Funny, too. Sometimes intentionally funny
and sometimes cringe-I-can’t-believe-you-just-said-that funny because
she was always direct and if you asked her for her opinion
you were gonna get it straight, no chaser.
Straight no chaser: I came home from the pharmacy today and told my wife I could be the Scarface of Flagstaff because I’ve met my prescription deductible.
What you need man? You need some of this Prednisone? You need some Ibrance, just a taste? What about this Prozac? Forty mgs, man. Not cut with anything.
My wife is impressed, in a way, that I’ve met my prescription deductible.
I mean, it’s the one time this whole fucking year health insurance has made
my life easier: my drugs are now free.
But nothing is free, Eleanor.
You know this.
I paid for these drugs.
Will pay for these drugs.
Been paying for these drugs ever since I was assigned a Social Security Number,
born in America, 1976, the Bicentennial Year.
My wife calls our rental house an estate.
She names it “The Mouse Trap” because we have mice and it makes me think
about that character in Trainspotting who dies of bird brain disease — wait, no. The character in Trainspotting dies of toxoplasmosis from changing his kitty’s litter —
because he was sick with AIDS, and as much as I think the mice infestation
is sort of funny (because why the fuck not, 2020? just keep piling it on. why stop at mice? why not fill our bathroom with a plague of locusts?)
I also don’t want to die of mouse-shit disease because
I am sick with cancer.
It’s a small fear.
I’m not really worried about dying from hantavirus or mouse-shit-brain (if that’s a thing).
I welcome all small fears to the table today
like fairytale mice coming for tea on their tiny bicycles
in tiny tophats and dress shirts and monocles.
So I just learned, Eleanor, that you were hit by a car.
And they gave you steroids (maybe Prednisone) after the accident and the steroids activated a dormant tuberculosis
in your bone marrow.
That’s how you died.
You were seventy-eight.
You made it about two years from car accident to the grave.
I have been asking the universe for two more years.
My wife thinks I’m lowballing.
Might be, but I don’t feel so much greedy for life right now as I want a little bit
leftover after this fucking election and pandemic, you know?
Of course the world won’t look the same, but I want to hug one of my students again, or laugh at a bar with a friend, or maybe even just sit in my living room with my sister who lives thousands of miles away, sit with her right here in this room, and maybe take some cannabis, and watch a stupid movie like Romancing the Stone and laugh about only things we would laugh about. I want to go on a romantic vacation with my wife
and play a board game with my niece. I want to stand in an airport terminal and eat
a Chicago dog while boarding a plane — I want to not be on the computer.
I figure this version of the new world is going to take about two years to happen.
So I’d like two years.
I know that makes people gasp.
I should want so much more!
But two years is good.
And if I get more, I’ll take them, as well.
Happily.
But this is not a choice one gets to make. It is both comforting and terrifying all the choices we do not get to make because we are not allowed — by nature or the universe or the gods — to make them.
Today, on the mountain, it is cold and windy, but not as windy as yesterday. Yesterday the wind was peripatetic which is a word I know and am misusing
because one of the characters in the play Doubt uses that word (incorrectly, sort of) to describe the wind.
I enjoy cold weather. Combination of ancestral DNA and Midwestern upbringing.
I could only ever live in Flagstaff. Not that Tucson isn’t cool, but it’s too damn
hot and I just can’t do heat.
I mean, I can do figurative heat. I am burning now, I’ll tell you what.
(We all are, I think.) I can take “heat” in the proverbial sense,
but physical heat? No thanks.
I’d run the air conditioning all winter, if my wife would allow this.
My friend Natalie, who grew up in Russia, once told me that in Russia they
sometimes wrap the babies up and let them sleep
on a balcony or porch in the cold wind and that the babies
would sleep better because they were swaddled and in the cold. She
could have totally been bullshitting me. I’d had two martinis and I was
fascinated by her because she was so . . . damn . . . well, Russian.
She could have been bullshitting me, but even if she was
I sometimes like to make myself cold at night
and think of myself as a cozy Russian baby
on a balcony somewhere in Moscow or maybe just here
on the mountain.
Yours,
Allison
