I am constantly asked how I am, ever since the cancer diagnosis. Total strangers ask me what kind or cancer I have, as if they have a need to know; and whether I am “OK” or “cured” … and, delicately, what my prognosis might be. I dislike these questions intensely because they cross the usual boundaries that exist between strangers. Of course, I just confided in a stranger that I have cancer, so I crossed the line first. I don’t mind these questions when they are asked by friends and family. But the curiosity of strangers is a different matter. What I feel is that they no longer see me, the person, but rather it, the cancer patient. Because I feel and look healthy and have all of my hair, people are amazed that I have cancer. Well, I don’t have it in my face! And no, I don’t want to hear about their lost loved ones, or their loved one who ‘beat’ cancer and apparently is stronger than those who didn’t make it.
I wish they would ask me what I am doing to be alive every day. I wish they asked me about my travel plans – which currently include Canada, Hawaii, and Yellowstone Park – or what baby trees I am planting in my garden. Planting a small fruit tree means that in many years there will be fruit. If I plant a tree now, I am likely planting it so that someone else can enjoy that fruit. Yet I can imagine luscious peaches, crisp green apples, or golden apricots, or tangy limes. In my mind’s eye, I can visualize the space that this currently one-foot-tall twig will someday fill, the shade it will create, the mouths it will please with ripe fruit.
Of course my little tree may not last – the current owner of a home and garden that I tended for ten years has removed all the trees and bushes, including two persimmons, two apple trees, and 65 camellias… then he wondered why there was mud in the swimming pool.
“Plant roots hold onto soil on a steep hill!” I wanted to say to him, but did not bother. I went home and pulled out my photo album and visited my old garden in all its tangled beauty. It is still here, in my memory and in my album.
I wish people would ask me what it was like to be a first grader during the Cuban Missile Crisis and be sent walking home during a yellow alert. That meant the nuclear bombs were far enough away that there was time to send us home so we could die with our families. And how did I feel when I saw Caroline Kennedy, just two years younger than me, on TV, and know that she had just lost her daddy? What was it like to move to northern Germany from California, in January? What was it like to be a woman scientist and consult in Japan, knowing the culture there is hierarchical and male dominated? What was it like for me and my older sisters when Roe vs. Wade was new in the land? And now that it has been struck down by the Supreme Court, and I have a daughter and a tiny granddaughter? This is what change feels like, and as an elder, I now have enough memories to have a bit of perspective.
Recently I was asked what project I was most proud of from my entire career as a scientist. No one has asked me that before. I was not able to pinpoint one best achievement. Before I retired, the answer would have been – whatever I am working on just now, or the next project that is coming up soon. It is not a meaningful question, in truth. Why choose only one? Why does there have to be a single winner on every little thing? I had the great luck and good fortune to work on numerous projects with a diverse team of scientists, engineers, and other professionals who came from around the world. I remember the Chinese protein sequencer chemist who preferred that I present our joint data. I remember fondly the Ph.D. statistician who explained confidence interval, tolerance interval, and prediction intervals in a way that I could remember. Then there was the cell biologist, who came from the East Coast of the US and whose manners seemed brusque to me, a Californian. Later, I lived on the East Coast and discovered that was just the style.
I recently came across my report card from high school. Such good grades! One can easily infer that I took it all much too seriously, doing all the homework and studying carefully. Now I wish that I had had more fun, been a bit more naughty, gotten a few ‘B’s. I am still a recovering nerd.
These days, I love to listen to a person’s life story. Airplane trips are perfect for this – one has enough time to chat casually, eat or sleep, and hear a story or two. One flight, my seatmates had been evacuated from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina (they slept most of the way from Texas to San Francisco). They spoke of the trucker who had space to give a ride to Texas for only thos who had $100 in cold cash, and how the group contributed to help the British woman who didn’t have quite enough. “We saw the best and the worst in people,” she told me.
Another time, a young man on his way to California for a job interview turned out to be the best friend of my former next-door neighbor in Philadelphia. He remembered my kids playing in our front yard ten years before. It can be a small world!
More challenging was the man with the backwards collar who sat beside me in business class on an international flight. This was within a year after the scandal about altar boys in Boston being molested by priests had broken in the newspapers. This man was high ranking and oversaw a large part of Canada. My innocent question about how the Catholic Church in Canada resembled that in the US led to a defensive story from him. I got a window into what denial looks like that was as fascinating as it was sad. Not here, never here…
Then one day it was a man who worked in the Pentagon. His business card had what sounded like a very important title on it – but, ignorant as I am of military ranks, I had to ask him what it meant.
‘Let me put it this way,” he said. “There are only 15 of us in the entire US.” So he was one or two levels down from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I grasped. (today I suspect that he was JAG, but I will never know). My teenage son knew what the rank meant and nearly swooned when I showed him the business card. Thereafter, he asked one question every time I returned home from a business trip:
“So Mom, who sat next to you this time?”
Paula Shadle is a retired scientist who lives in Oakland, California, and was diagnosed with cancer in 2024. She is married and has two children and two grandchildren. She participates in CSCLA’s weekly Creative Writing Group, which takes place every Wednesday over zoom from 1-3PM.
To learn more about the writing group and how to join, click HERE.
