It’s been a beast of a year. In rapid succession, I heard the cancer diagnoses of my daughter, my son, my husband, and my sister. Two cases ended quickly—surgeries and clear margins. Two did not.
Perhaps others are braver than I, but for me this wasn’t the year to wrestle with the philosophical problems of pain. Not the time to figure out why some people suffer all their lives through while others live pain-free and die peacefully at ninety in their beds.
This was the year to deal with fragments, little things, one at a time. Cancer might have cracked my world, but, come what may, there were grandchildren to feed and sterile dressings to change and pharmacy runs. And these small functions of life steadied me.
I had taught this theme once in another world. Long ago with seventh graders, I had read Frost’s Dust of Snow.
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of the day I had rued.
At first look, I told my students, this seems like such a pretty poem. But Frost doesn’t write about a hummingbird and an apple tree. He uses the crow and the hemlock, both long-held symbols of sorrow and death.
And in the presence of such doom comes the dusting of snow, something light and delicate, something silent and waiting to be noticed, something hinting of new beginnings.
It’s not that the suffering of people I love faded away, not that I forgot the increasing bone pain and malaise that each chemo cycle brings. It’s that I began to see that suffering exists alongside dewy grass and bright blue skies and dustings of snow. I found that sometimes, when big things can’t be changed, little things can help.
Apple to Apple 