time in a vial

By Catherine Berresheim

While others were baking sourdough bread and bingeing “Tiger King” episodes, I spent the bulk of 2020 relitigating a divorce settlement, fighting for my rights as a single woman, negotiating the high-risk safety measures needed to prevent contracting COVID, and avoiding arousing more suspicion and jealously in my ex-husband.

I have to admit that the Safer at Home mandate that was issued midMarch to flatten the pandemic curve came as pure relief for me. I was teaching 18 hours: five classes at the community college, and one college credit-bearing course at a local prison. In addition to the usual academic demands of being a full-time professor, I was dealing with some personal challenges as well. My white blood cell count was below normal since recovering from a bad case of pneumonia the previous fall. The state of Tennessee Department of Correction executed one of my students in midFebruary, and I was struggling with that complicated grief. Even though I had not yet been divorced five years, my ex-husband chose this time to take me back to court to petition to end his alimony obligation.

He did this because we accidently crossed paths on Groundhog Day walking on my neighborhood greenway. I was there with the guy I’m dating,

I do not want my only accomplishment to be my patience in waiting my life away.

who happens to be an old college friend of ours. As we passed on the narrow trail, his girlfriend explained to her teenage daughter, “That’s his ex-wife and his ex-best-friend.” Three weeks later, the court order arrived. My ex claimed I was living with my boyfriend, and that I didn’t, therefore, need alimony anymore since this man was most likely supporting me. His attorney sent 23 questions, or interrogatories, and a request for production of supporting documents. It ran 30 pages total, fishing for

details of my private life. I saw him a few more times that spring on the greenway until I finally stopped going there at all. It was a tremendous violation of privacy. I thought I divorced all of this.

There was an unspoken agreement that I made when I got married in 1985. As a kid who grew up during the second-wave feminist movement (1960s-1980s), I straddled two generational worlds and social constructs: the feminist movement and the June Cleaver stay-at-home moms. An unintended impact of the Equal Rights Amendment of 1972 was women of my generation were expected to be a good homemakers and work outside the house (in our matching pantsuits). The other option was to be your child’s full-time caregiver, make your husband successful first, and wait your turn at a career. If you fulfilled your duty as a woman, you would get your turn to: fill in the blank—earn an MFA, have your own career. But time is fickle and the mere arrangement bred inferiority.

First, I waited my turn at education in favor of my husband’s career. For 30 years, I hoped. There was always an excuse for why I couldn’t go back to school. Some household maintenance expense, braces, or a work travel plan always took priority. Delay, delay, delay… deny.

When I realized the bargain would never be honored, I went back to school to earn my master’s anyway. Then I waited for the divorce to be over.

Divorce that results in-futuro alimony just extends the patriarchal cultural dynamic. This is a type of support reserved for cases resulting in a “relative economic disadvantage” due to the inequity created by a longterm marriage. This permanent alimony can only be revoked because of death, living with a third party, or remarriage. I learned that because he was paying me the agreed $500.00 a month in alimony, he had the right to request all my financial records, question my visitors, and dictate how many times per week I could have an overnight guest.

The answer is two.

Two nights a week, or the “companionship” could be construed as a live-in arrangement. I learned he could drive by my house to check on

these things, and solicit my male ex-military neighbor to spy without any legal repercussions.

When my attorney proved the frivolousness of his petition, the former husband dropped his lawsuit, and then we countersued for the nearly $9,000 cost of attorney fees. I attended the court hearing via phone that October, and I was awarded $7,000 of the full amount.

When that was settled, I thought I would just need to wait for the vaccine, and then life would be more manageable. Life’s predicaments do not stop.

***

A “343” number shows on the caller ID glowing white at 2:52 pm the afternoon following my bone marrow biopsy. I know that prefix is from the Vanderbilt complex, so I answer. I also know that on December 23rd, late afternoon before a holiday break, it won’t be good news.

It isn’t.

“Hello, Ms. Berresheim, this is Michelle Chi.” I hate the formality of it. It feels indecent. We chat about how the biopsy went; I say that it wasn’t as bad as I feared. Of course, the drugs helped. She has some preliminary results. The pathologist called her personally to let her know.

Shit.

She’s sorry to have to make this call, rather than telling me in person. But, because it is COVID times, in-person visits are being avoided because of the recent surge. I understand.

The information comes out piecemeal. Her voice shakes a bit. She doesn’t want to tell me.

“Your bone marrow biopsy showed something called hairy cell. It gets its name because of the way it looks; cells with hair-like projections coming out from it. It is malignant. It is a rare type of blood cancer,” the doctor’s words ricochet their way around through the ear buds, I cry immediately when I hear the word “cancer.”

I see them: long strands, blonde, red, brown, black, like a prettier version of the COVID-19 virus whiplashing around. Tears keep me from

answering when she asks if I have any questions. I write the note, “Leukemia/lymphoma.” “Hairy cell, rare,” I write. “Indolent. Incurable, but treatable.” This is not exactly a surprise given the recent infections, but it is still a shock.

I tell her I’m in my lizard brain and I can’t think when she asks again if I have any questions. Will I die? I want to ask, but don’t. She keeps talking to cover the silence, trying to get her rehearsed speech out. She is referring me to an oncologist. There are a couple she’s researched, she hears good things about them both. She has been following my care for a year, can’t she keep treating me, I ask. She is sorry, but she doesn’t treat cancer. She works with benign blood disorders, not messy deadly ones. She seems to want this call over too.

She offers what she thinks is comforting: “People with hairy cell can live relatively normal life spans.” And isn’t that what we all want—a relatively normal life span? I don’t even feel like I’ve had my own life yet.

Time. I thought I had more time. Now I am really a cliché.

The silence grows too loud, so I oblige. “Well, Merry Christmas?” I say. “Thank you for letting me know.” My identities as A perfect end to a crap year—2020 was, indeed, one for the record books. *** I waited well into the New Year to tell people about my diagnosis. I didn’t mother, friend, and partner clashed with the inevitable label as “cancer patient,” want to spoil the holidays for others. I the old lady easy to needed time to buffer the news. More selfishly, I also knew their knowing would forever alter our various relationships. My identities as mother, ignore, to overlook, and to minimize my concerns or fears. friend, and partner clashed with the inevitable label as “cancer patient,” the old lady easy to ignore, to overlook, and to minimize my concerns or fears. I wanted time to absorb the shock.

When I did share, I had some typical responses and some I didn’t

anticipate. Sometimes it was like when I was pregnant, and no one saw my face; they

I cannot find a meaning for my suffering that Viktor Frankl would approve.

addressed my belly instead. Only what’s growing in me now won’t become a happy outcome of gestation. Or worse yet, the person somehow turned the subject to their aunt or father or brother who died with leukemia, or some other form of cancer, and instead, I had to comfort them, feeling guilty for triggering their unresolved grief. They offered solutions: I learned about juicing, and wheat grass, and enemas as cancer cures.

So what if I can have a “relatively normal life span,” but a completely abnormal life circumstance? What good is that? It depends on what you consider living. Chemotherapy in infusion centers with patronizing nurses six hours a week every few months, CT scans, and just one more bone biopsy, doctors appointments, and labs: vials and vials and vials of blood to be tested and sorted into categories that tell how I’m dealing with the poison and the cancer. Each week I await the results, as if my life depends on it—which, of course, it does. All this to navigate the medical industrial complex that feigns at caring, when we all know it makes no difference in their lives how you live or when you die: a holocaust or barbarity. I cannot find a meaning for my suffering that Viktor Frankl would approve.

These years were supposed to be my turn to do the things I’ve waited for: finishing the memoir, falling in love, and being loved, possibly getting married again, returning to Paris. Clichés being hijacked by cancer, the pandemic, the ex-husband. I do not want my only accomplishment to be my patience in waiting my life away.

Nine treatments: five of chemotherapy, given on consecutive days, four biologic targeted infusions given once a week, and two Pfizer vaccines. This is the recipe to buy me more time for times like these.