SYMPTOMS OF LOVE
Back in the prime of my flesh and bones, I was always dying of something. Cancer, more often than not. Doctors learned to humor me. One asked, while inspecting my knee for a suspicious bump, “Have you noticed the identical bump on your other knee?”
It was the era of the Bee Gees, platform shoes and Farah Fawcett. Decades would pass before I found Dr. Google, but I had another fast lane to medical reassurance. Duck into the closest bookstore. Make a beeline for the health section. Reach for a stout and severe-looking tome whose burgundy jacket suggested leather chairs in the faculty lounge of an august medical school.
I never bought A Dictionary of Symptoms. My ever-sensible husband would laugh, and I couldn’t blame him. Hypochondria was making me absurd. Cancer scares had a magical hold on me, as if by obsessing over my demise I could prevent it altogether.
Decades passed. I scoured the internet for portents on my every system and part. I creaked and sagged but powered on. Many friends and colleagues were not so lucky. I lost Joanna, Keitha, Arthur, Val, Bruce and my brother-in-law Jim to various cancers; James to a neurological disease I’d never heard of until it took him down. Anne, the confidante of my teens, had been planning to fly to Toronto for a visit when I learned of her fatal heart attack. My world-traveling, urban-hiking mother, who ought to be the wittiest, most outspoken centenarian anyone ever knew, died of a brain tumor at 67.
The bonds of a lifetime are like a garden. The first 40 years, give or take, you spend designing and planting the most beautiful retreat you can imagine. You water, weed and prune. The empty spaces appear so sporadically at first, the garden retains its shape. You don’t see that the garden you planted is slipping out of your control.
Sometime in her 50s, while cleaning out a bathroom cabinet, my mother found a dusty box of Tampax. How long had it been since she needed one of those? Absorbed in plans and projects, she didn’t notice her first missed period (could it have been the twenty-first?). Next thing she knew, she’d crossed a boundary from one phase of life to another.
Having passed my Biblical three score and ten, I’ve discovered the arithmetic of age. I relive a hike of 25 years ago, so vivid I can practically taste the sun-warmed cheese we ate for lunch on a stone wall in the Dordogne. Then I think of where I’ll be 25 years from now — most likely not among the living. “The wrong side of the dirt,” as noir novelist S.A. Cosby puts it, is where I’ll be soon enough. So why waste any time on habits that serve no useful purpose? I no longer Google symptoms that might be cancer. What I fear is not dying but losing people I love.
Another empty space in my garden is not just a fluke anymore. It’s the way things will be for the duration. I continue to make new friends (quite a few of them younger, thank goodness) but there’s no replacing the old ones.
Heading toward St. James Park with my dog, I wait at a busy corner for the light to change. Casey checks the sidewalk for aged pizza crusts while my gaze drifts over passing cars. From this corner, at least eight years ago, I saw my friend Bruce lean out a passenger-side window and yell, like a teenager bound for a party, “Hi, Rona!” No such thing ever happened in my teenage years. I was never going to that party, never caught the attention of a fun-loving guy with a gift of a smile. In my 60s that smile came my way. I practically danced into the park.
Bruce and I had one of those friendships that take a person by surprise. A former colleague of my husband’s, he initially struck us both as rather full of himself. As working life kept throwing us together, we followed his churning life: two marriages, a couple of boats, a number of successful businesses, a move to South Carolina. “We’re simpatico,” Bruce would say, throwing his arms wide at the sheer pleasure of our company. We celebrated New Year’s eve at his house on the beach. Ate takeout sushi at our condo. Somewhere along the line, we became a lot more than simpatico.
When I learned he had died of a longstanding cancer, I didn’t throw myself on the bed and howl, as I’d done for my friend Val. She’d been at my emotional hearthside for a good 30 years; Bruce was more of a front-porch guy. He’s been on the wrong side of the dirt for a long time now, but I see him every time I pass the corner of Jarvis and Adelaide. I am freshly astonished at the ease he kindled between people, the sense of being embraced and lifted up by his delight. I miss the piece of me he took with him. It’s a kind of symptom, the missing. A symptom of love.
Art: “Love is Hard Work” by Corita Kent, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
