235. Cities, Summer Forests - Ashleigh Bell Pedersen
Katrina Cuenca, Slowly We Unfurl (2020)
How could I lose such a precious window of time?
In the winter of 2020, I was feeling celebratory. I was newly thirty-seven, I was considering moving from my decade-long home of Austin, Texas, to New York City, and I was pitching my novel to agents. My life felt brimming with possibility. My New Year’s resolution was—in all seriousness—to host more parties. That spring, of course, the pandemic arrived. And one day after Austin went into lockdown, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.
As a cancer patient, I relished each milestone: the halfway point of chemotherapy rounds, the MRI results that showed my tumor was shrinking. The afternoon of my last chemo infusion, friends and I met at a park with champagne. I felt bloated from all the IV fluids, but overjoyed to celebrate (in our small, mid-pandemic way) the end of what I thought would be the hardest part of cancer.
After chemotherapy, however, I embarked on a year of surgery, radiation, and maintenance chemo infusions—and as I navigated the continued barrage of medical treatments and appointments, my emotions began to catch up with me. In the worst of chemo, I had rarely admitted (or let myself experience) my fear, sadness, or anger. I insisted on a positive attitude, plodding from milestone to milestone. But in the year that followed, I was knocked sideways by powerful waves of grief. It was the loneliest time of my life, and deeply frustrating. I had survived cancer only to feel further than ever from my old self, whose life had seemed so limitless.
As I approached my fortieth birthday this winter, the milestone invited yet another wave of grief. A third of my thirties, I suddenly realized, were spent first surviving cancer, and then its emotional aftermath. The revelation felt gutting. How could I lose such a precious window of time?
Then, days before my birthday, I discovered a poem.
In “It is Difficult to Speak of the Night,” Jack Gilbert describes his changing relationship to himself as he ages. The last lines read:
I am forty, and it is different.
Suddenly in midpassage
I come into myself. I leaf
gigantically. An empire yields
unexpectedly: cities, summer forests,
satrapies, horses.
A solitude: an enormity.
Thank god.
The poem arrived at just the right moment—as though from a friend who knew I could use a gift. I felt such kinship in Gilbert’s admission of aloneness, and wonder at his discoveries within it. What “cities, summer forests” await me as I navigate midpassage? What seeds are within me, longing to leaf gigantically?
- Ashleigh Bell Pedersen
