Rakoff - When my world was very small: a memoir of family, food, cancer and my couch

COPYRIGHT 2010 RUTH RAKOFF

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2010 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Rakoff, Ruth
When my world was very small : a memoir of family, food, cancer and my
couch / Ruth Rakoff.

Issued also in electronic format.

eISBN: 978-0-307-35819-6

1. Rakoff, Ruth. 2. BreastCancerPatientsBiography.
3. BreastCancerPatientsFamily relationships. 4. BreastCancer
Treatment. I. Title.

RC280.B8R35 2010 362.196994490092 C2010-901395-6

v3.1

For Tommy, Micah, Amit and Safi
My world big and small

And for Scott Sellers
My champion

K ING S OLOMON FELT that his most trusted minister, Benaiah, was becoming too full of himself and needed to be humbled. Knowing that Benaiah could not possibly succeed, Solomon challenged him to find a magical ring that had the power to make a sad person happy and a happy person sad. Benaiah set about searching far and wide for this magical ring to no avail. Just before he was about to admit defeat and return to his king empty handed Benaiah came upon an old jeweler and asked the question he had asked so many times before. Have you by any chance heard of a magic ring that can make a happy person sad and a sad person happy? The old man reached in his bag and handed Benaiah a plain gold ring with an inscription. Delighted, he returned at long last to King Solomon and with great pride presented him with the ring. The king took the ring and reading the inscription realized that Benaiah had succeeded. On the ring was written This Too Shall Pass.

Jewish Folk Tale

I T IS SPRING . The sun shines in the window and on good days bathes me in optimism. I sit lengthwise on my couch, my back propped against the armrest by an array of multicolored throw cushions, my legs extended and swaddled in the red, orange, purple, green, yellow quilt that begged me to take it with me when I passed it in the department store. I belong with you, it screamed, and I had to agree that it could not possibly find such kinship in another home. Color. Color will help me find my way. My own red, orange, purple, green, yellow road back. Its sequins glint at me as I sit with my notebook on my lap, pen in hand, spilling myself onto the lined pages, hour upon hour, day after day, searching for fragments of myself beyond grief, fear, worry. I used to belong to the world I see beyond my couch. There must be a void of specific size, exact Ruth volume, a void that, if only I can find it, I will be able to reoccupy. My rightful place.

These past seven months I have traveled to dark dark places. My journey in breast cancer has taken me beyond any borders I had previously known and deposited me here, here on the threadbare velvet, faded mustard yellow couch in the south-facing front window of my house. I am unrecognizable both to myself and to others. I have lost so much of myself along the way that when my young friend Rebecca comes to visit and I answer the door, she asks, Wheres Roof? Im working on the answer.

Growing up in the age of macram, batik, tie-dye and other hippie crafts, I remember making multicolored candles. We would cut off the top of a cardboard milk carton, fill it with ice cubes and pour in paraffin that wed melted in one of my mothers hijacked cooking pots. The hot wax would melt the ice cubes, leaving holes to be filled with another color of wax once the first color hardened. I am full of icy holes. I must make something hot to fill the holes. I dont expect to be able to recreate the old meI only hope to recover some of my previous solidity.

The postal carrier delivers the mail. I wonder what he thinks of the woman in the hat, sitting on her couch day after day. Sometimes I want to bang on the window and explain that Ive been sick. I am not lazy. I have in the past contributed to society. I used to leave my couch, and I even had a job. I want him to understand that I am in recovery and that is the reason I sit on my couch all the time. Why do I care what the mailman thinks about me? Im so caught up in myself that it doesnt occur to me that he probably has no thoughts about me at all or what Im doing on the couch.

I find the scratching of my fancy fountain pen on the paper of my dollar-store notebooks both soothing and amusing. The irony of how life catches up with oneevery experience, every seemingly meaningless choiceis not lost on me. My pen, a special edition Montblanc, given to me by my father because I do not lose things, because I can be trusted to take care of such a ridiculously expensive object, glides along my pages with ease. And yet, while I still have this pen I was given many, many years ago, I have lost myself.

I write longhand because I cannot type. As a know-it-all teenager in need of a makeup credit, I registered for a night-school typing class. I justified my absence from all but the first and final classes by convincing myself that if I never learned to type, I would never have to suffer the presumed boredom of being a secretary. (Although, ironically I turned out to be such a fabulous waitress that employers were always reluctant to promote me for fear of losing my incomparable skills as a food schlepper.) Since a passing grade in typing did not require any degree of actual proficiency, I smugly believed that I had played the system to my advantage and dodged the secretarial bullet. I didnt give much thought to the fact that, much like driving a car or doing the laundry, typing is a life skill. One I still dont really have. Now, when I have to communicate using a keyboard, as in e-mail, I muddle through, but Im certain that my hunt-and-peck two-finger dance on the keys significantly lowers my IQ. I am less stupid and faster with a pen and paper, so I sit and spend my time filling notebooks.

It feels as though Im weaving an intricate tapestry with my ink, picking up loose threads and attaching new ones. I am trying desperately to make my recent journey fit; to draw upon the sum of my parts to recreate my whole. I am not looking for meaning or understanding necessarily, but for integration of the new me with the one that came before. I drive my couch slowly, carefully steering my pen through uncharted territory. It is not a strictly linear journey.

At night, after my children are asleep, I climb the stairs to my bedroom and settle myself under the covers next to my husband of more than twenty years. I do not want to be touched. I have not yet found peace in my body, which has betrayed me and been violated and brutalized by knives and needles and toxins. I cannot give away what I do not possess. Instead, I clutch my notebooks and read to Tommy, who patiently sits next to me in bed with his laptop and types my stories. Through my words, the words with which I am finding my way back to myself, I let him in. It is an act of the utmost intimacy.