Snowdrops
The snowdrops in my front garden were planted in memory of Wayne Allan, my husband's stepfather, who died five years ago this week, of pancreatic cancer, only 6 months from his diagnosis, which happened to be on October 9th, both his birthday and Thanksgiving. It was just Wayne and I in the small private room of the emergency ward when the doctor, flustered, entered and brusquely delivered Wayne’s diagnosis. Wayne had few questions, I felt a weight sinking in my chest, knowing that soon my husband and mother in law would be back from fetching tea, and the silent, stoic, almost film noir mood of the moment would shift into keener, sharper, technicolour focus.
Wayne was a learner and a seeker and an artist, a journeyman dedicated to his craft. Always learning new skills - sculpting, collage, watercolour - always putting in the time in his studio, always reading, always curious. Wayne's work was focussed (from my perspective at least) on exploring the liminal space between the realm of the living and the vast unknowable mystery of death. Jacob at the foot the ladder. Empty tombs and rolled-away stones. Boats ferrying wrapped bodies over rivers. Angels, so many angels.
Fast forward a few months later. In the hospital, on a cold morning, I found myself alone with Wayne. I asked him how he was feeling about his diagnosis, the time he had left, what might lie beyond his death. We talked in a way we never had, intimately, as fellow explorers of the mystical. We discussed St Teresa of Avila, and Sartre, and Revelations. He told me, among other things, that if he died and it turned out the other side was full of cherubim sitting on puffy clouds playing harps, he would be deeply disappointed. We laughed very hard at that, the two of us, a memory I cherish.
This year, Wayne's snowdrops appeared unusually early in my garden, in early February, just as I began to truly grapple with my own mortality in a way no amount of death in the family - my father, my brother, Wayne, my mother - had prepared me for.
Just after Christmas, in the bath one evening I discovered a lump in my left breast. I wondered how long it had been growing in me, how it had gone from being imperceptible to very much tangible, seemingly overnight. When I saw my doctor early in the new year, she reassured me that it was likely nothing, but we’d test just to make sure. I nodded, agreed, no history of breast cancer in the family, it was likely a cyst. The statistics were on my side.
Scheduling and getting to my first mammogram took six weeks. The clinic was experiencing post-pandemic backlogs. I was heading out of country for a week to work at the end of January. Life carried on, busy and stressful, moving fast. Inside me this foreign mass was daily gaining in size and heft, unignorable, troubling, alien. The day I walked out the door to drive to my appointment, there were the snowdrops. Sign and symbol, omen and portent.
Only two days after my mammogram, tests and scans and biopsies and appointments were scheduled in rapid succession. Time felt elastic, everything happening too fast and not fast enough in equal measure. While I waited and worried, a late February snowstorm covered the snowdrops, those tiny little white harbingers. Nevertheless, underneath the banks of heavy wet slush, those little flowers were still growing.
On March 7th, when the snowbanks had melted enough to reveal those tiny bedraggled white bells again, I met with the surgeon, in an exam room at the same hospital Wayne was treated at. She told me I had invasive breast cancer, pathology results pending, and that treatment would begin as soon as possible, beginning with chemotherapy and immunotherapy, followed by mastectomy and further treatment to be determined.
Dressing myself again in the exam room, I felt as though I was watching a film, detached, calm, stoic. In the Uber home I called my husband and told him the news, insisting that it would not be safe for him to drive home, that he was to take the back roads and calm down before he began driving. I told him I was sorry for having cancer, sorry that he was going to have to endure what was coming, that I wished I could keep him from it. The Uber driver began to weep loudly and continued to do so all the way to my house, me in the back seat apologizing, once again, for having cancer. I don’t remember the rest of that day. Back to waiting.
On March 17th, when the snowdrops had fully recovered and were giving their all to a glorious final blooming, I met with the oncologists assigned to my case and learned that the cancer in my body was called triple negative metaplastic spindle cell carcinoma, the rarest of breast cancers. Aggressive and prone to spread, the prognosis for survival is poorer than for most other types, with very little known about it. Four days later, on the first official day of spring, I began chemotherapy and immunotherapy treatments. And so begins a new season.
The snowdrops, like me, look a little worse for the wear, and will soon make way for other blooms. They'll wither on their stalks, hidden by bigger leaves, flashier blossoms. Yet these modest, hopeful little bulbs, undaunted as they are by cruel winter’s capricious whims, will only be gathering strength through the riotous spring, the scorch of summer, autumn's splendour and the long cold sleep of the darkest months. Buried deep, unnoticed and unseen, they will continue to simply be, for me to contemplate, to whisper to, to dream about, while I make my way through landscapes of transformation, contend with the limitations of my own body, surrender to the healing of rest, and humble myself to the unknown.
Wayne's curiosity and tenacity are gifts, tools he left behind him that I know will serve me in this cycle. The great globe spins, the old stories remain, the mystery unfolds and the will to live trumps even the bitterest of conditions.