The Scenery of Cancer
Sometimes in life you don’t get
to choose, says Zen teacher and cancer survivor
Darlene Cohen.
And that’s a good thing.
Painting By Robert Pope. Courtesy
of The Robert Pope Foundation.
In
opening the hand of thought, Uchiyama-roshi
talks about experience as “the scenery of life.”
Experience simply presents itself, one minute
after another, the way scenery rolls by a window
on a road trip. Such experience is fully
engaging if we allow it to be our whole world,
moment after moment, without preference. Rinzai
put it this way: “Even if all the Buddhas in the
ten directions were to appear before me, I would
not rejoice. Even if the three hells were to
appear before me, I would have no fear. Why is
this so? Because there is nothing to dislike.”
Oh, really? I have often thought.
That’s not always been my experience.
The three hells appeared before me last
September, when I went to the doctor with a
distended belly (I had tolerated that distended
belly for almost two months because it matched a
lifelong worry: Am I getting fat?) and was
diagnosed with ovarian cancer.
The word “cancer” carries with it some very
scary baggage, such as death,
debilitating illness, and the removal of
much-loved body parts. But the baggage of cancer
has been most conspicuous in the people around
me. I have become a finite resource: some people
have started attending every class and lecture I
give; long-distance students have cancelled our
phone appointments and flown in to see me; I
don’t have holes in my dokusan schedule now. For
me, though, the idea of an imminent leave-taking
is too abstract. I don’t feel like I’m going
anywhere. When I asked my acupuncturist if he
thought I was in denial, he said, “Most people,
when they get cancer, have some life-altering
experience. They become aware of their lives for
the first time and reorganize their priorities
to make room for some kind of spiritual life.
But isn’t that already your job?”
I h A d
S I x T R E AT M E n T S o F c h E M o T h E R A
p y. I was put in the hospital for the
first two-day rounds so they could monitor me.
They shot my belly full of toxic drugs until I
labored just to take in air. I felt pregnant,
but not with any child of this world. I couldn’t
lie down or sit with that enormous belly on top
of me; I could only walk. For hours I staggered
up and down the hospital corridors, pushing the
IV stand ahead of me, and occasionally stumbling
with exhaustion against the wall. Finally, in
the middle of the night, a nurse with tears in
her eyes cut me loose from the IV and I walked
free. The next morning I thought, dear God, what
do you have to do to bring tears to the eyes of
an oncology nurse?
I went home on the third day, and chemo hell
continued. I couldn’t breathe deeply, eat, or
drink. I lived in a primal animal realm in which
I was a creature without thought patterns or
discriminative judgment, experiencing sensations
and emotions that passed through in a constant
stream. For twelve days I lay on my couch,
laboriously breathing in and out, enveloped in a
gestalt of pain and fear.
Yet simultaneous to that misery was the most
beautiful autumn I’d ever seen in my life,
happening right outside my room in a grove of
maples and redwoods. The slanting light,
characteristic of northern california autumns,
dramatically showcased the reds, golds,
apricots, and browns of the evolving plants. As
dawn broke each morning, sunbeams penetrated the
windows along my eastern wall, progressively
highlighting the dark wood of my chair and
table, the threads of my blanket, the reds and
blues of my rug —and my waiting body. At such
ecstatic times I felt as if I were being lifted
and carried right through the windows into the
air on a heavy linen sheet borne by the
sweet-faced angels that used to illustrate the
turn-of-the-century hymn sheets. My world was
full, lush, and compelling.
Since then I have wondered what grounded my
willingness to sink into pain and fear and
ecstasy as they manifested in turn. What enabled
me to patiently observe the “scenery” of my
illness as it unrolled?
In my animal realm, more attuned to the pulses
of the earth than I ever was before, I began to
be palpably aware of the well-being ceremonies
that people were doing for me all over the
country. Whole sanghas were chanting every day
for me with all the psychic vitality at their
command.
I immediately felt the benefits when I woke up
from the surgery to remove the tumor: As the
anesthetic let me go and I moved toward
consciousness, I became aware of a path of
stepping-stones spread out before me in the
dark. I put a cautious foot on one, and it held
me utterly. I stepped on the next with my other
foot. It held me absolutely. The stones were
immovable, supportive, reliable. I stepped
confidently until the light flooded in and I saw
the faces of my husband, Tony, and my good
friend Keith smiling down at me in my bed.
W h E n
I h A d M y h I p R E p l A c E d two
decades ago, life before and after the surgery
was completely different. life before was one
flowing whole, but until I healed, life after
surgery felt mismatched. This time, however,
there has been no rent in the fabric of my life.
The days before the tumor surgery and the days
after continue to be all of a piece: I see
students, I write lectures, I get cut open, I
eat Jell-o, I receive visitors, I feel as sick
as a barfing dog, I pace the corridors, I ride
home with the passenger seat all the way down,
and so on, to the experience of golden apricot
colors, helplessness, dread, and being borne on
a sheet carried by angels. Next to this kind of
unbidden adventure, a life of preference becomes
not only self-indulgent but also deadened. When
my son was a child, I refused to see the stupid
Muppet movies popular then, or to go to
Disneyland, or to color Easter eggs. He had to
do all that with his friends’ parents. Now I
wonder what kind of narrow-minded twit chooses
her aesthetic tastes over spending exuberant
time with her child! When you insist on having
only particular kinds of experiences, nothing
can deeply touch you. you’re too busy judging.
on the other hand, a life lived openly without
filters includes pain, heartbreak, Disneyland,
and unpleasant occurrences. But you do have a
satisfying feeling of being infinitely
approachable; the universe gets through to you,
whatever scenery it’s hauling.
For many years now, I have been consciously
practicing not always choosing what I prefer.
The first time I ever did this, I was in an ice
cream parlor. I was surveying the flavors,
trying to determine which would be the most
intense chocolate experience. Suddenly it
occurred to me to just step away, close my eyes,
and pick a flavor. I did so and, much to my
horror, I picked orange sherbet. I thought,
should I go through with this? yes, I decided.
And you know what? orange sherbet is great!
Sherbet melts faster on the tongue than ice
cream, and though I’m not a fruit-flavor fan,
the taste of intense citrus was
delicious—unexpectedly delightful and
refreshing. And to think, if it weren’t for that
little experiment, I would have gone to my grave
without ever having tasted orange sherbet.
Most of our preferences don’t make much
difference, like whether to choose chocolate or
orange, but if you always go with your
preference in every matter, then it’s harder
when it does matter—like preferring health to
cancer. The statistical weight of your always
choosing what you prefer becomes enormous, and
your flexibility sags under it. It’s much harder
to see everything as scenery.
Now I regularly practice nonpreference. I wear
whatever underwear comes up in my hand from
reaching into the drawer. I randomly choose the
third item down on a menu. And I watch with
enthusiasm every movie my grandson chooses. ♦
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