Elephants and Tea - September 2022 - 8

The Courage of Vulnerability CACTUS CANCER SOCIETY
Why I Stayed Away
From Survivors
MELANIE KENT
" My demographic, " I told my sister. " Can we say, 'my
demographic?' " It was code, so that when we navigated
the COVID-tightened New York sidewalks-chatting
almost directly into others' ears-it didn't have to be
" cancer " that they heard, " cancer " that I shared, like a
little poisonous puff of fumes on the air.
It was also partly that " young adult cancer
survivors " was a lot of syllables. I didn't like
the shorthand I had discovered: " AYA, " for
adolescents and young adults with cancer. It
sounded too much like a club I was a member
of, like the YMCA. But the main reason was
that saying " cancer " still felt like pronouncing
one of those subtle Arabic or Lao sounds
in my mouth knowing I had got it wrong:
unfamiliar and shaming. It felt dangerous
and bizarre, like a spoken password to a
toxic sci-fi fantasy world, or a curse word
drenched in a drug that makes you dissociate
when you swallow it and tastes clinical, cold,
and bitter like the iron in blood.
I didn't want any claim on the " AYA
community. " " My demographic " kept some
distance, the same kind you use to chart
casualties in Excel.
I remember at the beginning, my oncologist
mentioned she could put me in touch
with someone young who had my kind of
cancer. It sounded like a truly horrible
idea. Talk with someone who could die too?
Who reflected everything that was horrible
about what I was dealing with? No way.
A friend of a friend commented that her
niece was in New York at the same treatment
center and she would be happy to
connect us. She messaged again, and then a
third time when I didn't respond. The very
idea made me feel so overwhelmed I burst
into tears. How could I manage to bear
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SEPTEMBER 2022
anyone else's experience of this? How could
I be expected to carry that? What could be
worse for me right now? To a small, bitter
piece of me, it seemed like a selfish impulse,
playing hooky with helplessness to fix an
unfixable thing. Like two sad people could
equal one happy one, and she could get the
satisfaction of feeling none of it except the
pat on her back.
It was an extension of the cancer stories
that got piled on me that first month:
a classmate's aunt, a colleague's grandmother,
a friend of a friend of a friend.
They would name the diagnosis, the result,
and a couple details about the struggle.
Obviously, they would only stick to the
stories of those still alive, but they would
share them like they were somehow good
for me. This person has cancer and they are
living . . . so? The subtext: be encouraged?
I hated those stories with a hard H and
a sharp T. They exposed me. Cut straight
through to my fears and underlined all my
unknowns. They shed no light at all on my
chances. Comparison was as irrelevant as
bringing up someone's odds of going to
the moon. What it did do was ignite the
huge question mark over my life in crazy
neon colors. It would flood my tired mind
with others' trauma-trauma I was currently
experiencing so that every detail of
days or doses or prognosis landed like a
punch to the gut. I was too raw not to feel
It was the idea of being
friends with people
who were much more
likely, statistically,
to die earlier than
normal, and to have
very difficult things
happen. It was the risk
that everyone I knew
was weighing with me.
How closely do I want
to be entwined with
that kind of hard?
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Elephants and Tea - September 2022

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