Comfort

The tickets had been intended for others. Others with schedules so full that they were obliged to reject the gift of a free night at the concert hall from the business where my father worked. Others, I speculated, with inviolate veins and scalps full of keratin-rich hair.

I was in the living room when Dad called over his lunch break with the news that he’d come into possession of some tickets and would Mom and I like to join him that evening. I had curled up on the couch hours earlier with a book that I hadn’t opened. All morning, snow-roofed homes and weighted branches had steeped in the weak sunlight. Cars, leprous with winter salt, drove down our slushy suburban street. A little snow had fallen, halfhearted flakes that rather accentuated the dinginess of the day than purified it.

“We’d love for you to come, but don’t feel like you have to,” Mom had said, cupping her palm over the phone receiver and studying my reaction. 

I hadn’t been anywhere but the house and the chemo ward for weeks. I decided to go.

----

Hours later, I stood in my bedroom, gazing at my reflection in the mirror. I struggled to extinguish the self-pity that kept swelling in my chest at the sight of my wasted frame swallowed up in the tailored black dress, my head so obviously naked beneath the hug of the small knit hat.

Already, before it had begun, my evening was being spoiled by my vanity. It was not so much that I felt ugly, although that was part of it. Even more, I felt conspicuous. I imagined the world pulling away from me, watching with mingled pity and curiosity to see how I conducted myself.

Of course I recognized the narcissism of this feeling, and would try to talk myself out of it. I didn’t really look so very ill. I was at the high point of my treatment cycle, which consisted of one week of daily hours-long stints in the chemo ward with a needle in my vein and then two weeks of recovery. Tonight was the tail end of my second week of rest, and so I found it relatively easy to feign a state of normality. As for the hairlessness—well, it was winter in Michigan, and unlikely that anyone would look twice at a hatted head, certainly not long enough to pick up on the traces of affliction that I imagined to be so emblazoned on my person. And even if someone were to infer my disease, their flicker of interest would soon expire. Perversely enough, this bothered me as well: that my trial, so crushingly significant to me, was of such negligible weight to the rest of the world.

I was ready as I would ever be, attended by the mental and physical dis-ease that I was beginning to assume an inescapable aspect of my illness. I left that room hoping only for distraction from it.

---

My parents were dressed up and conjuring a Sunday aroma of peppermint and leather in the kitchen. The large un-curtained window held our reflection tenderly as we huddled for a moment, ascertaining the whereabouts of the tickets and car keys, slipping gloves over fingers and shrugging on coats and purse straps. Dad had started the car early, and it was a smoldering cloud of vapor in the gloaming as we hurried through the frosty air and ducked inside.

After I’d settled into the back seat, I pressed my forehead against the cold glass of the window.

The sight of the sky kindled inside me a flame that fed off the air in my lungs, leaving me breathless. It evoked the idea of the deep sea. Inhospitable realms, both: lungbreaking, immense; dark, yet strangely lit; replete with matter, yet insinuating a fearsome emptiness. I looked at the waxing moon, the glinting stars, the tattered pennants of the clouds. And while my mind buckled beneath the vastnesses shoving their way in, while the seeming absence of heart within them froze mine, yet there was something in me that also felt a kinship. The phrase shaped itself in my mind: Deep calls to deep. I heard Modest Mouse singing about my blood being just like the Atlantic, about the oceans in our bodies. I believed what the Preacher said when he declared that God put eternity into man’s heart, and my spine tingled at that idea from Job: These are but the outskirts of His ways, and how small a whisper do we hear of Him. As my mind started to whirl with associations, Dad pulled the car into reverse and I reeled myself in.

Everyone feels like you do about the sky, about the sea, I thought to myself, grimly rebuffing the mystery, allowing it to curdle in my brain. Everyone feels their affliction is exceptional.

---

We arrived early, managing to secure a parking space within reasonable distance of the building downtown. I had to focus on keeping my footing on the crusted sidewalks, and so was not afflicted further by the beauty of the night and what it taught me of my own vanity. Nor did I have much occasion to dwell on my illness as I made my way through the crush of humanity in the yellow foyer, absorbed as I was by the twinkling chandeliers and opulent wall hangings. And the people: milling and laughing and exclaiming, dazzlingly appareled and perfumed, and consolingly human with their Midwest-flavored speech and finger-greased tickets. I had not been in a crowd like this for months, and the sound and energy of it enfolded me in an almost tangible embrace, melting the chill of my moment in the driveway and filling me with a sense of partaking. The happy echoing hall, generating a warmth that transcended the physical, lifted my heart to almost giddy heights, so that I looked with loving wonder at the faces around me. For the first time it occurred to me that perhaps my suffering might be, in a way heretofore unseen, self-inflicted. I had kept so much alone lately.

My parents and I scouted our seats, and I trained my gaze on the stage, its gleaming surface graced with a concert grand and a cello. Leafing through the program, I studied the biographies of the featured musicians until the lights dimmed and a hush descended. 

A woman stepped onstage and seated herself on the piano bench. After her, a man sat behind his cello and took up his bow. The audience waited as the artists matched their instruments.

A final set of lights dimmed, and a fresh beam, the spotlight, flooded the center stage. The concert began.

At first, I was carried away by the technical expertise this couple displayed. I tried to imagine what it would feel like, to be in their bodies devotedly obeying the music even as they masterfully created it. But as the night wore on, I ceased to notice the artists or their instruments at all. The music lifted me right out of my cancer-ridden body, out of that roomful of shimmering ambience and warm humanity. My body became all ear, and that ear became all heart, and that heart filled and flooded with music that was, in Rilke’s words, “the transformation of feelings into audible landscape.” The music was speaking to me in a twofold language: the universal tongue of humanity, and the special dialect of my own soul.

The concert is linked in my mind with the sight of the cold dark sky from the car window. Here, too, I felt piercingly alone, yet not in a way I would describe as lonely. I was keenly aware of the pulsing current of my own buried life. The Atlantic in my blood. The eternity in my heart. The imago dei stamped on my very DNA.

I had a sense that my presence there, complexly enthralled at that specific moment of layered experience, was itself an active part of what was happening. That idea led to another: that the concert might be, similarly, an active participant in an even greater occurrence. And so forth, widening ever outward, the universe all happening and creating and being created into something at this time inscrutable, yet already poignant and crackling with import.

---

I pressed my face to the car window the whole ride home, watching city lights and shadows blur beneath the clear raised eyebrow of the moon, feeling deliciously lightheaded. The comfort this world had to offer me was no anesthetic, nor was it the placebo I had begun to suspect. Quite simply, it was the Self taking its rightful place in the universe: exquisitely affirmed, and happily forgotten.

The ridged pink scar setting permanently into the skin above my umbilicus, the bandage in the crook of my arm, my naked scalp, the knowledge of approaching weeks of nausea and fatigue—all of that was still there. But the spell of preoccupation it had cast over my life was broken. 

I returned home, a healthy invalid.