Years after arriving from Hungary, my great-grandfather had a job burying victims of the 1918 Spanish influenza outbreak. According to family lore, he never got sick because he had stuffed his pockets with mothballs.
When I was in grade school, my mom put mothballs into my coat pockets to ward off illness. I don’t think I got the flu, but I did get the common cold, as well as a lot of questions from other kids about why I smelled like mothballs.
I don’t think I ever discovered a reason why my great-grandpa never got sick. My personal theory is that if you smell like mothballs, people might keep their distance. Mainly, I think you need to have faith in something for it to work. I regularly take those dissolving vitamins concoctions like Airborne to ward off colds when I feel them coming on. I worry that if I stop believing in them, they won’t work.
I’ve been thinking a lot about faith, and lack thereof. I started feeling sick again in late December. The disease is progressing, and the last treatment of PRRT is being put off indefinitely. (At last count, my white blood cells were finally up but my platelets are still down. My marrow is no longer a rich environment, but closer to a wasteland, from what I understand, and the doctors want to keep it from turning into a full-blown Chernobyl.) Though the disease is progressing, the doctors seem optimistic they can keep it controlled for a bit. I am being bought little increments of quality time.
Naturally, I’ve been wondering how much time I have left and how much of that is worth living. Some people, like me, are wary of getting any more possessions or making too many plans, because I won’t be around to enjoy them.
Other people, however, firmly believe they’re going to get better. They think if they can hang on, they can be around for a cure. I wish I could have that kind of faith.
I often have difficulty having faith in anything. It seems as if, in order for things to work, you have to have faith in them.
In June, shortly after my first PRRT treatment, I went to a “Hypnotism to Improve Your Mood” workshop at Gilda’s Club, the non-profit for cancer patients and survivors started in memory of late comedian Gilda Radner. I’m a cynic and didn’t expect anything to happen, but felt desperate. It was shortly after the breakup and my heart was leaden. I had been going over what I could have done to make things different and how I had ended up alone despite everything I had compromised to prevent it. The same refrain of abandonment was on repeat.
I entered the Gilda’s Club outpost in Brooklyn and sat down at a table of about 10 women. The room smelled strongly of another attendee’s lunch, a strong mixture of canned soup and vinegar. I closed my eyes and accepted the hypnotist’s suggestions: to let go of things that didn’t serve me, to feel better.
To my surprise, I felt better. The heaviness lifted.
Friends asked if it was like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; like most movies, I haven’t seen it. But I stopped obsessing. I let things go. I often replay cringeworthy moments over and over again. I dwell. I feel myself circling a drain of depression that I can’t escape. With just one visit, I stopped. It helped not only with the breakup, but with other aspects of my life. I’m easily wounded and dwell, and since then I’ve been able to let things go much more easily. Not always, but I would say it changed my life.
I attend about once a month, when Gilda’s Club offers the workshops. The hypnotist says it’s not him doing something; he makes suggestions that we follow. For example, he says to imagine he’s put a brick in one of your hands, a helium balloon in the other. The brick hand will lower, the balloon hand will rise.
Some people believe that, with enough faith, you can improve your health. I looked up several of the names bandied about. Dr. John Sarno, who died in 2017, was a sought-after physician for back pain at NYU Langone, though it also seems he was equally dismissed. He believed a lot of chronic ailments was caused by psychological anxieties. (Someone said deep-seated anger could help cancer grow, and I certainly had a lot of that over the past decade.) There’s Bruce Lipton, a molecular biologist who speaks of the importance of the mind-body connection. I would take this all with a grain of salt, as well as with doses of conventional medicine.
Is there anything to willing yourself better? I read an article this summer by Jo Marchant, author of Cure: A Journey Into the Science of Mind Over Body, and it seems as if the mind can at least help you feel better.
My mom believes I’ll get better. She keeps telling me to have faith. In September, I traveled to Europe with a friend and we met my mom in Paris, then we traveled to Lourdes, France. At the foot of the Pyrenees Mountains, Lourdes was a small town in France until the mid-1800s, when the Virgin Mary appeared in a grotto to St. Bernadette Soubirous. Today, about 5 million people visit Lourdes per year, mostly to visit the shrine and gather water from the spring, which has been said to have cured many people. I went there in high school with my mom and grandma, but we didn’t do the baths, as none of us needed the curative properties.
This time, we waited in line, organized by volunteers wearing name tags of their home countries and the languages they speak. (According to one of my neighbors, a member of the church across the road goes every year for a month, and many of the volunteers are those who have been cured.) The baths are divided between men and women. We waited on benches until we were ushered into one of the baths, each with its own changing room and a flurry of women helping to dress and undress those going into and coming out of the baths. Years of Catholic school has made me weirdly modest in women’s locker rooms, always covered, but years of gym locker rooms has made me pretty brazen in terms of pilgrimage sites; one of my volunteers who held up a big towel around me while I dressed was told to cover me back up after I told her I was OK putting on my tights by myself.
Once you’re undressed, they put a sheet around you and when it’s your turn, you’re led to a cement tub filled with cold spring water. Women on either side of me said a prayer and then they led me in, and to my surprise, I also sat down and they held me under my arms and swished me around a bit. Then they send you to get dressed. “We’ll pray for you,” said one of the women, and it almost made me cry. For some reason, the kindness of strangers makes me cry more. I’m not sure why, but part of me feels that I don’t deserve it. I think because when people close to me have hurt me, I wonder if it’s because they know me better and are treating me the way I deserve; maybe I don’t deserve the kindness from strangers.
It’s hard to believe, looking out at the sea of people gathered for services and the lines for the grotto that I would be among those cured when so many have faith and seem to deserve it. As we marched in the candlelit rosary procession, I was touched by the beauty but also couldn’t help but feel hopeless sometimes as so many hope to be healed.
My cynicism isn’t always bad. Sometimes people remind me that doctors don’t know for sure what’s going to happen, and that’s true, and they don’t profess to know everything. I’m wary of people who say they do know, particularly for a price. I’ll go to a $5 palm reader at Coney Island for fun, but I’m not setting store by something bigger, no matter how comforting that might be.
I’m still plagued with doubt. I’m looking out uneasily into the horizon, waiting for the storm of illness. How can I trust myself again? Is it too late to find faith in myself, at least? How do I find faith and meaning?
While recently in Trinidad de Cuba, my friends and I came across a gallery with art that made us stop in our tracks. The artist, Yuniesky Fernandez Frias, is a fisherman and most of the paintings, created on pieces of old boats, depict a bearded fisherman in a wide-brimmed hat. A word at the top of each painting outlines a concept, illustrated by the fisherman in his boat below. One that struck me was called “Duda” (“Doubt.”) The artist explained that he was thinking what happens when we doubt ourselves. The fisherman in his boat is upside-down in the water, with fish floating by; his line is cast upward to the sky, fishing for birds.
Since the day I tuned into the cat cam, I felt as if my world was turned upside-down. When everything shifted, I was left gasping for air, and it took awhile, but I realized it was air I was finally breathing in. I had been in the water, fishing for birds.
Now, and until my time is up, however soon that might be, I’m grateful for every breath.
A few months ago, I quoted Albert Camus, “Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.” I was surprised that the quote was his, but a friend found a short video tutorial about him, and I was reminded that he was the most fun-loving of the existential philosophers. I can’t imagine it’s something that is hard to achieve, but it’s probably why he’s one of my favorites. Like his peers, he maintained that life was absurd and pointless, but that one didn’t have to necessarily despair and could find some sort of happiness. In his 1942 essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus compares our lives to that of Sisyphus, the Greek mythological character condemned to forever roll a boulder up a mountain and watch it immediately fall to the bottom again. Instead of despair, the absurdity of life requires acceptance. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” Camus says.
I thought of this quote as I spent an entire December weekend doing laundry. A moth had fluttered out of a sweater my ex had left behind, and I decided I was going to wash everything and finally reorganize my closet. We had moths a few years ago and had washed everything, but they’re particularly hard to get rid of because they can lay eggs in your wool clothes. I was tired of seeing the occasional rogue moth. So I spent an entire weekend rolling my laundry to and from the laundromat, in what seemed like a never-ending modern-day Sisyphean task. I hate doing laundry and could not imagine myself or Sisyphus happy and was eager to no longer think of moths and existential dilemmas.
I took a break Saturday night and went to a friend’s birthday party and had a weird extra bit of time when I went to the store and bought a new rolling laundry basket to replace my broken ones. I also got a few closet moth cakes. I thought they would smell better, but they are really just giant moth balls, as it turns out.
Now, as a testament to the power of faith, my apartment always smells vaguely of moth balls.
