285. At the Circus - Lia Romeo
Georges Seurat, Le Cirque (1891)
I’ve always considered myself a basically lucky person. In a lot of ways, I still do.
I never realized how many people there are in the world who don’t have cancer. I go to the grocery store and it’s full of people who don’t have cancer, putting kale and corn flakes and popsicles into their carts. I open my Instagram feed and it shows my friends drinking beer in Austin and baijiu in Shanghai and not having cancer. I took my son to New York City recently to see the circus, and marveled at the crowds of people who didn’t have cancer emerging from the subway and walking briskly across the street.
Of course some of those people probably did have cancer and I didn’t know it. Some of them probably had cancer and they didn’t know it. Until a few weeks ago, I was one of those people. I had a clear mammogram last year, but mammograms don’t pick up everything. What’s inside me has probably been growing for longer than that.
I’ve always considered myself a basically lucky person. In a lot of ways, I still do. I’m lucky to have health insurance. To have excellent doctors. To have a husband who’s stepped up to take care of me, though we were separated before I got diagnosed. As Friar Laurence says to Romeo, “a pack of blessings light upon thy back.” But still. Before cancer I felt like I had a basically easy, happy life. And now I don’t, and I miss that feeling. And a lot of people lose it sooner than I did, and a lot of people never have it in the first place. There are worlds of things that are worse than this. (But still. But still.)
My mom has suffered from severe, constant pain for the past eight years. On a good day, her pain is a 7.5; on a bad day, it’s more like a 9. It’s in her right leg, a part of her body that doesn’t exist anymore; the doctors amputated it six years ago hoping the pain would stop. It didn’t. She’s tried ketamine and psychedelics, physical therapy, acupuncture and spinal cord stimulators. She’s had electrodes implanted in her brain.
As the granddaughter of ranchers, my mom has always had a “buck up and deal with it” attitude. But since the pain descended, she’s become allergic to hearing other people complain. My husband and I lived with my parents during the pandemic, trying to manage demanding jobs and a two-year-old with no childcare. We were struggling. She didn’t want to hear it. We could take walks. We could sit without hurting. We could go for hours, even days, thinking very little about our bodies. Yes, we were trapped at home, reading Go Dog, Go for the two hundredth (two thousandth?) time, but we were so, so lucky.
I resented this at the time. I was her child, and she couldn’t see—or didn’t care—that I was unhappy. But now I listen to one friend tell me about her husband’s broken ankle, another friend talk about the dinner date who never showed up, another friend tell me about her dog eating a sock and costing her thousands of dollars in vet bills. I love my friends, but I also hate them a little. I want so much to go back to worrying about these kinds of things.
I took my son to the circus because I figured he’d love it. But in fact, I was the one who ended up being enthralled. He’s four, and it’s possible he assumes that all grown-ups can juggle three parasols with their feet and do backflips on a high wire. He doesn’t yet understand that the body has limits, that the body can suddenly, silently turn against you. I hope he doesn’t understand this for a long time.
We watched the acrobats, jugglers, and clowns for two hours, me amazed, him wiggling, and then it was time for the final act. It was surprisingly simple. A man came out to the middle of the ring and began blowing bubbles. A woman sang a Spanish love song as the bubbles floated up towards the top of the tent. They shimmered red and blue in the circus lights. They might have been the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. And then one by one they began to pop— pop— pop until they were gone, and the show was over.
- Lia Romeo
