by Andrea Auten
Any time I visit the Pacific northwest, I think of my leathery Theatre Movement professor.
With her long, straight Alexander-method limbs, arms stretched forward, bent like a footballer ready for the snap, she once told our class a tale. How she lived here on some water trimmed land, tended crops, performed A Moon for the Misbegotten and raised goats. One night, screaming called her to the water’s edge. A wolf had ahold of a goat. Dr. Mary stormed the beach, grabbed it back from great jaws, and delivered the goat to safety. She stared us down, dramatically paused, and said, “I really loved that goat.”
I’m baffled by what stays in our minds— a rolodex of recall.
Another time Dr. Mary explained how people give up on love out of fear. She taught us that only the most courageous choose to love one person for life. Unless you both fall off a cliff together kersplat, one of you will die, leaving the other to live on in grief.
My younger brain grabbed that parable and made it a monument. Widowhood runs in my women. My cells sense it coming.
Tom, my life partner, and I dream of growing old, watching our children’s children giggle as they tag each other in the sand. It’s a soft breeze, beach naps wish. But I’ve stopped going to the beach. Stopped wishing. Stopped planning beyond the next seven moons. That’s when our youngest will marry his beloved. After that, my mind blanks. A hollow, unfillable screen.
In January of 2017, I had just launched into the coveted Antioch MFA program. Writing every day, planning for the next residency in a slipstream of calm, I crafted page after page. But my nights tossed in terrors where a beast came to snatch its prey. It came in the form of a roaring lion charging for my husband. It tore into flesh and crushed my eardrums with its great yaw. I’d awaken to realize the roar was my husband’s cough just inches from my ear. “Just a tickle,” he assured me every morning. “Just my sinuses.” But my widow maker cells perked already sensing dread.
“A huge mass,” tests soon uncovered. In his lung. My lover’s right lower lobe. Stage IV. Terminal inoperable already metastasized into five lesions on his brain.
I love words.
To study their parts, their etymology. My research brain digs to find their meaning. But these new words terrified. The wolf snarling sound of: Adenocarcinoma. Pleural cavity empyema. Pretty word empyema for pockets of pus.
Tom survives a deep empyema that festers where the lung mass has trapped it. A 40% chance to survive this first terrible trial. Plenty more trials await us.
Six years this way.
My body keeps score, because brain research says cancer partners respond as if we too are sick. I lose teeth, hair, build up adipose tissue. Tinnitus sings cicada songs in my left ear. One eye macular degenerates. Three of those six years I sit iron-assed to the couch with my new best friend Zoom because I cannot risk going out and bringing Covid into this house.
I write less and less…until…no words come. The cells are on Def Con 3, my mind blanks.
We’ve hit a big year for my family. 2023. Babies, big birthdays, Tom’s doctoral degree completion. Our son’s wedding, our own milestone wedding anniversary. Continued chemotherapy, staph infections, a nail-biting brush with Covid. Medical copays, existential threats, atmospheric rivers.
Tom secretly canvases friends and family to surprise me. A big birthday party where they gift me a new 15-inch MacBook Pro. Its intention: to provide unfettered writing time without work emails, student papers, wedding planning, or medical reports.
It sits on my desk for months now. Untouched, so clean and completely blank—ready to take the words I can’t make.
Andrea Auten is a cross-genres writer based in Los Angeles and founding member of the DWG Writers Group. She holds two master’s in creative writing, one from Antioch University Los Angeles where she teaches and works as a writing specialist. Her work has been featured in Lady/Liberty Lit, Lunch Ticket, The Antioch Voice, and in Made in LA’s third anthology, and she is the dual host of The Scapegoat Guild Podcast. She lives with her husband and their two cats. Andrea can be found at: andreaauten.com.
Emerge Literary Journal 