Rites de Passage...

The daily drift of junk mail rested on the coffee table. Near the pesky paper pyramid, stood a smaller stack of two library books, two monographs memorializing particular experiences of life after chemo...for breast cancer cancer survivors. I glanced at the covers, and read the commentaries on the back cover. I opened the red softcover volume and peeked inside...a list stared back at me, a list of how to celebrate the end of your treatments. Walk on a beach, and contemplate the eternal by staring at the oceanic horizon. Place all of your empty pill vials on your driveway and run them over with your car. Host a gathering, ask your friends to bring tulip bulbs, and plant them as symbol of a hopeful future. The suggestions ranged from exalting the endless, to indulging the whimsical, to a botanic domestication of uncertainty. A few sentences down the page cautioned...it may take several weeks after your last chemo treatment to feel rejuvenated. The caveat is accurate.

Her circadian rhythms are still calibrated by the cytotoxic cocktail delivered almost a week ago. The usual side effects, sensing their imminent eviction, impose themselves upon the biological theater...a festive and most unwelcome curtain call. Nausea...takes a few too many bows and lingers on the stage for the past few days. Irritability and exhaustion...duel each other in an attempt to seize a few rays of the remaining limelight. Her follow-up appointment in a week or two will complete this performance...chemo closure to the tune of an oncologist's applause. No refunds allowed.

While she devoured her new library acquisitions, I dined on a different genre of recitation. Eduardo Galeano's Walking Words (1995) served up a satisfying safe harbor of fiction. Thumbing through the dog-eared pages, I reacquainted myself with traces I had left behind. One of my favorites recounts how a man "...searches in vain for the word that slipped away as he was about to say it. It was right on the tip of his tongue. Where did it go?" Galeano sews up the playful prose with a few questions. "Is there a place for all the words that don't want to stay? A kingdom of lost words? These words that escape, were do they lie in wait?"

I dissolve myself in different riddles and dwell on the currency of chemotherapy-induced irritability...a coinage minted from toxins and stamped with abrading phrases. Fortunately, this legal (un)tender speech lost much of its value with repetition...a devaluation of meaning...hyperinflation of a different sort. What will I do with all this worthless wordage? Is there a space for all the words that shouldn't have been said? What will be my ceremony to mark the transition into this post-chemo era? Walk on the beach and bury my journal in the sand? Place it on the driveway and run it over with the car? Plant it in the garden, and imagine a tree bearing rant-flavored fruit? I abhor the randomness of chemo-induced irritability...its artificiality...its poisonous prose born from the body's reflex to erupt, eradicate and expel the toxic elixir. Irritability infused by cytotoxins is indecipherable. Is there a ritual space for all the events that needn't be exalted? An ethnography of lost rituals? These rituals that abate, where do they lie inchoate?