Good grief, yet another poem

[ninanevermore]

I wrote this one about a conversation I had with a friend almost a year ago. She was going through something very scary, and I suddenly realized how helpless I was and that there was nothing brilliant to say at a time like that, no magic words to make everything better (at least none that I know of). If anyone does knows some, could you please pass them on to me?

Biopsy

"It'll be okay," I said.

Not that I knew for certain,
not that I even had a premonition -
I only said what I hoped was true.

She looked worried;
She looked like the call
from her doctor's office
had knocked her off balance
like a tornado coming our of a clear sky
twisting through her day
and leaving debris
where the houses of her composure
had once stood.

"You're young," I said
"You haven't missed an annual exam.
It's minor. A few cells. They can fix it."

"Of course," she said.

"When?" I asked.

Next week. Wednesday.

Seven days for her not to sleep.
A week to imagine the worst.
Seven days for her to ride
strapped in a demented roller coaster
up and down and around
before coming to a stop
at the top of a loop
to leave her hanging upside down
until the lab results came back.

I wished I could invent
the perfect phrase to make it better,
to offer comfort and relief
to her worry and torment,
I wished I could conjure
the magic words
to let her sleep at night,
to evaporate the tears
poised on her lower lashes,
to reassure her that this was nothing.

But I gave her all I had,
as pathetic as it as;
I spoke with a feigned confidence
worthy of an Oscar;

"Don't worry," I told her,
"It'll be okay."



-Nina Erickson
02/2005
(c) 2006

To finish the story, her biopsy was positive but the cancer was contained and had not spread. She underwent a procedure to remove it and really is okay. I'm glad I was actually right, for once in my life.

Comments

Re: I really like this poem...

[neanahe.livejournal.com]

This was actually just a fragment of a much longer conversation.

My beliefs are Christian, but I call them "atypical" because I am not dogmatic about them or forceful; that does not mean my belief and my faith are not deep or sincere.

I guess by saying things would be okay, I didn't mean, "You won't have cancer," I meant, "You can handle whatever comes." Her annual pap had come back abnormal. I think she was more afraid that treatment for whatever they found would leave her infertile even more than she was afraid of dying.

Her back story was that she had divorced several years before from an abusive husband and had given up a baby for adoption because her husband did not want her or their unborn son. In the months before the conversation above, she had met someone and fallen in love and was thinking about love and having a family again for the first time in years, only to her fertility threatened. It was like having the light at the end of her tunnel flickering and threatening to go out.

I think I felt more helpless having her go through this in front of me than I would for anyone else. I had just come back to work from maternity leave and she had seemed to live though my pregnancy vicariously; having a baby with a supportive partner who loved me was such a drastic difference from what she had to go through with her ex-husband.

"It will be okay" really was the best I could offer; the emotion in the room was too enormous and anything more felt like it would have been drowned out. This is a short poem, so I left out the hugs and handing her Kleenex and cracking silly jokes to make her smile through the tears. That would have been a much longer poem. :D