Writing for Sanity

By Marlene Park and William Park

Marlene Park was born in Los Angeles. She attended UCLA and went on to obtain a Ph.D. in art history at Columbia University. She taught at Barnard, Hunter, and Lehman Colleges, but spent most of her career at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Although she began as a Medievalist, she tur

• Language: English
• Publisher: WILLIAM J. PARK III
• Release date: Nov 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781087932248

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writing for

SANITY

Marlene Park

Edited with a Foreword by William Park

Note on the Text

The book that you are about to read is not the full text of Marlene’s journal. Except for the section on Peru, Marlene did not edit or revise her accounts of her experiences at the Stanford Hospital. As a result, the journal includes a great deal of repetition, especially about the scheduling of appointments and her questions about changing protocols and treatments. Some of this material I have eliminated, but the chronology of her struggle remains unchanged. The photos in the text are all Marlene’s, taken from the Gallery on her website: .

The Editor.

Foreword

Marlene Park

1931-2010

Marlene was born on December 1, 1931. Her father, Warren Lamotte Shobert, was a lawyer who grew up in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, a descendent of Pennsylvania Dutch and English settlers going back to the early 18th century. After graduating from Bloomsburg State College, he served in the Navy during World War I as a chief pharmacist mate. While on submarine duty Shobert contracted tuberculosis, and as part of his cure moved to Colorado where he attended the University of Colorado Law School, graduating first in his class above his lifelong friend, Wiley Rutledge, who later became one of Franklin Roosevelt’s appointments to the Supreme Court. After graduation, Shobert moved to California and set up his own law firm. At one point, one of his clerks was the young Richard Nixon. As part of his practice he represented Hollywood studios, particularly Paramount, in negotiating terms for location work. On one such assignment he met Marlene Dietrich, who upon learning that he was soon to become a father, asked him to name a daughter after her--which he did, a fact which always embarrassed Marlene, who doubted the story’s veracity.

Marlene’s mother was Isabel Campbell, who was born in Connecticut but grew up in Arizona, where her mother, May Tingley, a native of Nova Scotia, decided to homestead in the region of Phoenix before Arizona had become a state. In Arizona, Isabel became a lover of horses and an accomplished rider. An extraordinarily beautiful woman, during her long life (she died at 89), she married no less than eleven times. Warren Shobert was her fourth husband and Marlene her only child. This extraordinary record resulted not so much from lasciviousness or cupidity as from an ingrained restlessness and optimism, in which she always imagined a better life and a greener field elsewhere. Isabel’s motto, like the American mother in Erikson’s Childhood and Society, was "Let’s get the Hell out of here." Needless to say, the constant change in fathers and places to live took a toll on Marlene, who nevertheless triumphed over a childhood which might have destroyed a person less gifted by nature and grace.

Among the happiest years of Marlene’s life were during World War II when her mother had settled into her longest marriage, this one to a successful contractor named Charles Buschlen, whom Marlene adored and called Poppy. It was during this time that she lived in Hollywood on Olive Street and, under the name Buschlen, attended Berkeley Hall, a Christian Scientist school for girls. Throughout Marlene’s life, some of her closest female friends were her Berkeley Hall classmates. When the Buschlen marriage broke up, the house was sold to the actress Sylvia Sidney, and Marlene and her mother moved to Burbank, where Isabel could keep a horse. By this time she had become a real estate agent and property owner and had changed her name to Gail Page (not to be confused with the actress of the same name).

In Burbank, Marlene attended Burbank High School, but in her senior year she was transferred to the new John Burroughs High School. She always felt somewhat cheated by the change, John Burroughs lacking the facilities and the friends she had enjoyed at Burbank. She graduated in 1949 and enrolled at UCLA. By this time, she had decided to live with her grandmother May and sometimes with friends, rather than her super--mobile mother. At UCLA, where Marlene lived in the Co-op, she majored in marketing, realizing that she would have to choose a career where she could support herself, but it was the courses with art historian Karl With that in fact shaped her future career.

In the 30s, Warren Shobert acquired a property in the Santa Monica Mountains, originally used as a movie location, which he developed into a summer resort named Lake Enchanto. As a child Marlene played there with the child stars Dickie Moore and Bobby Breen, and we have a picture of her from 1935 sitting in the lap of Margaret Sullavan in between takes of So Red the Rose. She loved this place, and as a teen worked there as a life guard. Her father also acquired a large ranch and dairy farm in Oregon, near the coast, in the vicinity of Florence, where she spent a happy summer, the memory of which was tempered by lifelong regrets that he did not keep the property.

In the summer between her sophomore and junior years, Marlene got a job working at the Scripps Institute in La Jolla. There she learned to scuba dive--this before licensing--and fell in love with a fellow worker, Mel Martin, a World War II veteran, who like Marlene was a Christian Scientist. They married, but soon became estranged, so that by the time of her senior year, Marlene was once again single. After graduation in 1953, she accompanied her mother to Mexico, where Gail was attempting to set up a business, of course taking her horse with her. For the most part they lived on the coast in Mazatlan, and here Marlene acquired her fluency in Spanish.

The business plans not working out, Gail, the horse, and Marlene returned to the States. At this point Marlene decided to try her luck in New York, where she shared an apartment with her UCLA classmate and lifelong friend Marsha Singer Fullmer and her Berkeley Hall classmate Mary Webster, who was achieving success as an actress on Broadway. Marlene began as a waitress at Schraft’s, a job that did not last long, and then took a job at the ad agency Young and Rubicam. She also registered, under the name Martin, for an art history course at Columbia’s School of General Studies. That changed the direction of her life. She did so well that she was encouraged to matriculate in the Art History Graduate Program, which she did, now supporting herself with clerical jobs in University-related offices.

Columbia at that time had without discussion the finest art history program in the world, in no small part thanks to Hitler. The faculty featured Rudolph Wittkower, Julius Held, and Erwin Panofsky, among other luminaries. But Marlene admired most the home grown master, Meyer Schapiro, who taught courses in both modern and medieval art. Marlene chose to become a medievalist. She wrote her master’s essay on types of medieval crosses, doing this so well that Schapiro gave her as a dissertation topic the difficult task of solving the problems surrounding the style and origin of the Crucifix of Fernando and Sancha (1063), an ivory masterpiece in the Archeological Museum in Madrid.

It was during this time that she met me, a graduate student in English Literature. We fell in love and were soon wed, a marriage that lasted fifty-two years, until Marlene’s death. Before either of us had finished our degrees, we had a daughter, Catharine, a great joy, but the three of us scraped along financially, living in a five story walk-up on 109th Street, our bed a former door covered by a sleeping pad. Life improved considerably when we were offered a comfortable two bedroom Columbia apartment on 118th Street between Amsterdam Avenue and Morningside Heights.

In the summer of 1961 Marlene received a travelling grant from Columbia so that she could go to Spain, see the crucifix, and continue her research. This was our first trip to Europe. In the spring of 1961, Schapiro was on sabbatical, and his place at Columbia was taken by Helmut Schlunk, a German art historian who was an expert on early Christian art and also director of the German Archeological Institute in Madrid. With the help of Schlunk, we rented a small apartment on the Avenida de la Luz, along which at that time shepherds still herded their sheep. From there we could walk to the Institute in El Viso, where we both worked on our dissertations. The highlight of this trip was a motor tour of the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostella, undertaken in a small Seat 600 (Fiat 600) into which Marlene, Catharine, our chica Emilia, and I could barely squeeze.

One of the questions about the crucifix was whether it was Mozarabic or Romanesque in style and origin: Spanish scholars tending to attribute it to the native Spanish style, French scholars seeing it as Romanesque. By the time Marlene had finished all her other work on the crucifix, this was the one problem she could not solve, though she suspected the French were right. Then in the fall of 1967 while living in London, we made a trip to the north of France to examine examples of an Anglo-French Channel School of early Romanesque illustration. On emerging from the bibliotec in Arras, she exclaimed, If I had drawn it myself, it could not be more perfect. Here was the prototype for Fernando and Sancha’s style, carried no doubt by French artisans along the pilgrimage trail. She soon published her discovery in the Journal of the Warburg and Cortauld Institute.

Schapiro could not have assigned a topic more suitable to Marlene’s love of research, of hunting down evidence, and solving problems. She always wondered if her life would have been better had she gone to law school, but she was a much better detective. As much as she loved Perry Mason, she would have been happier as his chief investigator. She was Nancy Drew, not lawyer Drew, an identity she herself was very aware of because John Litel, who played the senior Drew in the movies resembled her father, and because as a teenager in Hollywood, she was once mistaken for Bonita Granville, who played Nancy. The more difficult the mystery, the better she liked it. And so it was with discovering a forgotten sketch by Gainsborough, tracking down the subjects in a Macdonald-Wright mural, placing the works of New Deal artists in their proper contexts, or searching out her ancestors in genealogical libraries. The only case she never cracked was the birthplace of her Scottish grandfather, Arthur Carnegie Campbell. Needless to say, although the Roman historians were among her favorite authors, Marlene was a voracious reader of murder mysteries and thrillers.

Back in the States, however, she became frustrated in attempting to be a medievalist, taking adjunct jobs at Hunter and Lehman Colleges, and being a mom now with two children (our son William was born in 1966), and two step-children, Jonathan and Geoffrey. So when she secured a tenured track job at the new John Jay College of Criminal Justice, she decided to switch her interests to American art, something her students could actually experience at first hand. Field trips in New York intensified her interest in the Federal Arts Projects of the New Deal, and led to a joint course on the subject with Gerald Markowitz, a history professor at John Jay. The course in turn led to further research and ultimately to an art show and catalogue about New Deal Art in New York State entitled New Deal for Art. Such was the origin of a gifted Americanist.

Further researches and their continued teaching together led Marlene and Professor Markowitz to write Democratic Vistas, the definitive study of the post office murals of the 1930s. By this time Marlene had joined the Graduate Faculty of the City University of New York and there developed such courses as Art between the Wars, Public Art in America, and American Women Sculptors. She also headed The Public Art Preservation Committee which contributed to the saving of the Rincon Annex in San Francisco and, among numerous other works, the preservation of James Michael Newell’s WPA fresco in Evander Childs High School in the Bronx. The many letters Marlene received from surviving New Deal Artists, all of whom appreciated her role in preserving their work and linking them to a new generation of students, she bequeathed to the Archives of American Art.

In the thirty years she spent at the City University, Marlene perfected her courses and won the admiration and love of the dozens of students she aided in achieving their Ph.Ds. In the early years we spent summers in Europe, where I was director of the Sarah Lawrence Summer School in London and Marlene was the school’s art historian. Later, as Marlene became more involved in public art, we devoted summers to visiting and photographing the sites most common to public art: not only post office murals but state capitols, county court houses, public squares, and cemeteries. It was during this time that she developed her skills with the camera, and over the years she created a superb collection of photographs of art. Some she left to the Sarah Lawrence College Library; most she gave to the Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt Institute in Hyde Park, New York. Her extensive library of art historical books she donated to the Carl Schmitt Foundation in Wilton, Connecticut.

In 1964, we moved to a faculty apartment on the campus of Sarah Lawrence, where we lived until 1979. In that year, we bought a big, old house adjacent to the Lawrence Park Historical District in nearby Bronxville (Sarah Lawrence is actually in Yonkers) and lived there until we retired in 2000. During this time Marlene converted to Roman Catholicism, a fact she seldom discussed even with close friends. Partly, she wanted unity in the family, as I had converted two years earlier. Partly, she admired Christian art and its role in preserving classical art. But mostly this decision came from her own deep, quiet, and private spirituality. Father George Rutler received her into the Church during the Easter Vigil in April, 1987 at the Eglise de Notre Dame on Morningside Heights, only a few blocks from where Marlene and I first met.

In her final years at John Jay and the Graduate Center, Marlene worked on and completed a book on public art in America. It serves as an anatomy of how public art works, that is the complicated and often contentious interplay of the public, the government, and the artist. It provides case studies drawn from all the periods of American history and from all types of public art. It is a monumental work, yet she never published it. She became discouraged by an early rejection of the manuscript which she attributed to the shift in art historical studies away from what she considered most important, namely the art, to the politically correct concerns of gender, race, and class, even though her own work dealt admirably with all of these issues. So, once she retired and moved to Santa Cruz, she turned away, emphatically, from art history and devoted herself to photography. As she writes in the journal:

I only know I want to devote all the time I can to working and none to exhibiting, finding a dealer/gallery, selling, and so forth. The uninterrupted flow of work is all-important to me. It’s the continuity between Stanford visits and mini-crises; it’s what gives me a life that is more than a contemplation of death. At the moment I’m concentrating on color and making color the life of the photograph.

This interest had been growing well before her retirement. In her last two years in New York, Marlene exhibited her photos of public sculptures in shows at Sarah Lawrence and at John Jay. And once in California, she, ever a lifelong student, took great pleasure in local courses in Photoshop. Now her great love of travel became focused on photo ops, and led to trips to Death Valley, Lone Pine, Las Vegas, and even to an open helicopter tour of Kauai. One may see a gallery of her work on her web site <marlenepark.com>.

Always gifted with good health, a strong body, and abundant energy, what a blow it was for Marlene to discover she had breast cancer. She had had a lumpectomy in her left breast while still in New York, but now, years later, the cancer returned. A mastectomy at Stanford revealed that it had metastasized throughout her body. Her surgeon informed her that the cancer was Stage IV and the disease terminal.

As she explains in her journal, Marlene decided not to tell people, treating her disease as she did her religion--privately. She did not want pity or consolation, thinking rather that such sympathy only focused on the disease and made it worse.

I had an image of each person who knows acting like a mirror, reflecting death back to me. When people know they form part of a circle. When the circle is complete, I will die because all I will see around me is death; the mirrors will focus death on me. There will be no escape from the circle of mirrors.

So instead of confiding in friends and family, she turned to her journal, Writing for Sanity, as she called it, and expressed her thoughts and feelings there. It is the story of an extremely talented and intelligent woman struggling to keep her mind while losing her body.

While undergoing treatment at Stanford, Marlene seriously considered alternative cures, the chief of which, suggested by our son Bill, was to put herself under the care of Sol Sol, a Peruvian shaman who lived in the Amazonia village of Requena. The journal provides a full and vivid account of the month we spent there. And although the chanting, the rubbing of her breast with a black stone, the tapping of her head and torso with an herbal brush, eating only fish with small teeth, the prohibiting of alcohol and sweets, the blowing upon her of untreated tobacco smoke, and the placing of vegetable compounds on her breast, plus three ayahuasca sessions unfortunately did not cure her, they were as effective in retarding the growth of the tumors, for a time, as was the more conventional combinations of drugs and chemo therapy she received at Stanford.

Amazingly, for six years, Marlene lived without visual symptoms of her fatal illness. And in those six years she traveled, worked at her photography, and, like Achilles, prepared for her death. She organized her various papers, created a marvelous cook book, illustrated with some of her photos, which she made into copies for Catharine and her three daughter-in laws; wrote this journal; and all the while worked in her garden.

During this time, we went twice a year to Kauai, where we had purchased a time share, and where she loved to swim. Her favorite trip was to St. Petersburg, Russia, where we spent two weeks visiting the Hermitage and the palaces, the fulfillment of a lifelong desire. She very much wished to visit London and the National Gallery again, and in fact we had made reservations to do so in September of 2010, the visit coinciding with the beatification of Cardinal Newman. But in April of that year, Marlene began to weaken. Her stomach swelled up with liquid and at times she became short of breath. Nevertheless, she struggled to maintain an active life, bravely continuing with her routines, projects, and social life.

On Saturday July 3rd, at the Shrine of St. Joseph in Santa Cruz, she received the rite of healing, often thought of as the last rite or absolution. In her journal she writes about the time that she refused the sacrament, but, curiously, or typically, not about the time that she accepted it. As ever, she was as quiet about her spiritual life as she was about her illness, but I felt that this sacrament worked to give her some peace in what became the last week of her life.

On Saturday, July 10th, in the afternoon we attended the opening of an art show at the Art League of Santa Cruz, a show that featured one of Marlene’s photographs. Though suffering from shortness of breath, she refused to go to Stanford for treatment to relieve the pressure on her lungs, preferring instead to wait until Tuesday and her next visit to Dr. C., her oncologist. After dinner as she sat on the couch in the living room reading a mystery, she began to cough, went into the kitchen, and collapsed. I immediately called 911, and the paramedics arrived quickly and drove her to nearby Dominican Hospital, where a crew of doctors awaited her arrival. Frantically, they worked over her, but could not save her. Marlene died at about 10:30 P.M. of a pulmonary embolism. She got at least one of her wishes. As she wrote about an infection in 2005: I do not want a long, slow painful demise. I want to die with my boots on, to be a flame quickly extinguished.

Marlene was notable for her soft voice and her generosity and kindness to others. Her children and grandchildren loved her dearly, as did friends, her colleagues, and the many students she inspired and guided through the difficulties of graduate study. On October 24th, 2011, at The CUNY Graduate Center they presented an impressive daylong Symposium in her honor and created a fund in her name for the support of future students.

Marlene wanted this journal to be published. In its original form it is over 500 single-spaced pages. Much of this describes in detail the procedures and bureaucracy of the Stanford Hospital, as well as the enormity and horrors of what she termed the cancer industrial complex. Because of the repetitions in these passages I have abridged some of this aspect of the journal. What remains will remind readers of the brilliance, wit, heroism, and virtue of Marlene Shobert Park. At her memorial mass, attended by her four children, nine grandchildren, and hundreds of friends and former students from across the country, a lector read the passage from Proverbs 31.

Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies…Strength and honor are her clothing and she shall rejoice in time to come. She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness….Her children arise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her.

-- William Park

Part I

Baring a Breast

later entitled, the memoir of an experimental vertebrate

or the long lament of a laboratory animal.

2004

The computer wouldn’t let me name this file today 5/07/04. But thank heavens for computers, the quiet friends in whom one can confide and store the thoughts on a hard drive. They are so patient; their error messages are not judgments or even opinions. This is a good time for an electronic companion.

Friday, May 7, 2004

Today is the 7th and I awoke at 4 AM with a new thought—I can pretty much do anything I want. I don’t have to worry about how long my pension will last. I don’t have to keep taking vitamins. I can rethink my life. I can live on pepperoni pizza and chocolate sundaes. Who says I have to drink decaf coffee? I can stay up half the night and sleep late. I can cease being dutiful. I have a new freedom. But now that I can do what I want, I’ll have to find out, after a lifetime, what it is that I want and hurry to do it.

One real problem is that this new liberty calls into question the habits of the past. Were all restraints, all limits merely imagined and self-imposed? Couldn’t I have lain down on the couch for an indefinite time, without prior agreement as to why and how long, without the prior approval by the conscience, that there is a good reason or some other worthy purpose in doing so? Did I have to come to the end of my life to justify it? Have I found liberty or just another justification? Couldn’t I now have a concierge instead of a conscience? The other serious problem is that these new ideas call into question the efforts I did make at living a sensible life. Were all my efforts pointless? Should I not have bothered because this was my destiny? Did I ever make sensible decisions; was I ever in charge of my life?

Yesterday the doctor said he had never seen so many diseased lymph nodes after removing a breast. If only everything could be solved with a sharp knife. I should have enjoyed the last hours with my breast rather than dreading surgery. Surgery was the fun part. All the clinic people who had been cheerful, friendly, and helpful, became cool, slightly distant, stopped looking me in the eye, and started looking at the beige linoleum flooring. They had done all they could for me and were saving their energies for my successors. (They knew but couldn’t tell me that I was among the damned.) Suddenly they could no longer help me, and I was assigned to someone who barely speaks English. She doesn’t know what the tests are or how they have to be scheduled. She can’t do her job; she doesn’t ask anyone how to do it, and no one tells her. She uses her energies in avoidance. (She doesn’t understand my situation; are we both better off?) But one of the particular problems of the particular disease is that one has a heightened sense of time. Are the delays she is causing giving the cells time to spread and make the case hopeless? Doctors are rather vague about time, perhaps because they can only remedy some finite situation in the flow of time. They can say it may be early or late, before or after a certain time, but their measurements are no more precise. Their knives cut flesh, not time.

Yesterday my husband and I had a good laugh. I think my disease is my business and have asked him not to say anything to anyone. He likes to tell everyone everything. But we pretended that since my health is no one’s business, neither is my life. We rehearsed his responses when he couldn’t tell anyone I was dead. She’s not here at the moment. Can I take a message? At least my daughter also laughed at the idea of her blabbermouth father keeping such a secret when I replayed the scenes for her on the cell phone as we weaved around the mountain roads on the way home. She’s more upset than I am, because at least I have a sense of accomplishment from having lived a long life. She’s only half way through her life and doesn’t yet understand that once you reach a certain age you can see far enough into the future to imagine your own death and come to terms with that vision. It’s not that one wants to die; it’s just that one accepts the inevitability in a way that younger people can’t because they’re not supposed to. They’re supposed to cling, and we’re supposed to let go. Suddenly images of Harold Lloyd on a ledge near a large clock pop up; he’s combating time, balancing between life and death.

Since the rest of this year and perhaps the rest of my life will have to be spent waiting until it’s time to phone, waiting for phone calls to be returned, waiting for the tests to be scheduled, waiting for the results of the tests, waiting to schedule an appointment, waiting to see a doctor, waiting to see another doctor, waiting for the doctor to decide on a treatment, waiting in the waiting room before the test or treatment, waiting until the technician comes into the treatment room, waiting to leave until the doctor approves of the test or treatment results, an endless cycle of waiting. Fill out more forms; answer the same questions again. Clutching the phone, where did I put it, look to see if the message light is blinking. One can’t read much; one can think too much. I suppose prayer is the only mental activity that can fill such voids. But I wonder if one’s prayers reach beyond those banal little, cubic rooms with their forced cheerfulness and impersonal cleanliness into which one is successively closed. They are so airless they seem like rehearsals for closing the coffin; the door shuts, the lid closes. One imagines those cubic spaces are prayer proof, having the equivalent of a lead lining to keep prayers from escaping. I am spending a lot of time in them.

I can rationalize the situation. Of course, the first thought is, Why me? If the paranoia passes, then I think that the bad genes come from my father’s family. But I got the good genes, too, so how can I complain? Then I think that most people, and I’m certainly most people and not one of the genetic elect, have to pay a price for every decade of longevity after 70. And I’m paying the price for living into my 70s. Hopefully it will not be too high a price and will buy a few good years. Certainly I want to buy enough time to find something else to die from. Exceptional people are graceful and useful into their 80s or even 90s, but I’m not exceptional. Being reasonable makes me cry, because rather than being persuaded by my own arguments, I think of the people I love and not wanting to leave them.

Maybe the coming months will be a good time for downloading patches, charging camera batteries, giving the newly-planted tomatoes extra water, and other mindless tasks. But immediately one asks, How much of one’s life was spent in mindless tasks? Should one have just refused to fold the wash and thrown it in a heap on the living room floor? It’s a great time for making lists, but lists of what? Lists of regrets, lists of what one should have said? The trouble with this line of thought is that it raises the question of how ridiculous one’s life was, how petty, how much a meaningless list it was.

My oldest friends want parity; they want us all to live to a ripe age and then die more or less at the same time. We have watched so many fall by the wayside, we don’t want to be left alone; we want to stand together, unrealistic though that may be. I don’t want to let them down. When should I say goodbye?

And then there is the question, what did I do wrong? Was I selected for a sin of commission or omission, something I did or failed to do? Should I have watched movies on daytime television? Was I insufficiently aggressive? Is this a punishment? I should think of life itself as a reward, but somehow I think of punishments. The late medieval altarpieces, with explicit scenes of corporal punishments, the damned consumed by flames of regret, beset by snakes, little devils poking them with pitchforks, seem descriptions of life, meditations on the nature of life, and not scatological treatises or moral warnings. Hell seems less a threat and more a statement of fact. I always liked the stocky devils, dressed in their downward-licking, flaming skirts, however worldly and unconvincing they are. They are doing their jobs, businesslike in their attitudes and motions. Now they’re attending to me, dressed in green or blue medical costumes, but equally efficient and unconcerned.

The devil images are reassuring. The mind’s imaging capabilities cause macabre images to form, uncontrolled and uncensored. Instead of little devils, I see myself hunted, pursued, invaded, eaten away, devoured. If I’m not hungry, perhaps I’ll lose weight; that would be good, but suddenly the image of a fat corpse appears. Vanity must die, but I can’t banish the picture. I am beset by strange thoughts. Are horror movies true; am I the dead living? Do I have the right to enjoy life like a living creature? Has my identity changed? Am I still a woman or some sexless creature from a nightmare?

If I had enough faith would I be healed? Should I feel guilty about that, too? How would other gods handle this? The pagans might try to purge unclean spirits, and that seems near the mark. Would Jehovah, like Charlton Heston’s Moses, strike me down in anger so at least I would know he noticed? Does Allah listen to women? My husband says there is a bank account I can open in which I can deposit any suffering and sacrifice, using the balance in the account to help children and grandchildren. I rather like that idea.

Yesterday the surgeon told me casually that my left arm was defenseless, an empty moat, a drawbridge that will not retract. I have lost an arm as well as a breast. No blood pressure wraps, no blood draws, no scratches. When I think of the avalanche of paper generated by the privacy laws, at least four pages when one goes to the dentist to have teeth cleaned, I wonder how such advice can be mentioned as an afterthought while he leaves the room. The reconstructive surgeon is the same: walk the fingers up the wall, rotate the shoulders. Why are the instructions not in writing? After two days at Stanford, my file was two inches thick. The paper is for them, part of their system. I am paperless until they fill out the death certificate.

Today Donald Rumsfeld testified before Congress about the prison abuses in Iraq. Our daughter was promoted to show producer; a daughter-in-law passed a board and received a ten percent raise.

Saturday, May 8, 2004

I woke up weary, without the feeling of liberation, only thinking that things will get worse. Perhaps I’m suffering from rejection by the surgeons—are their jobs finished or pointless? In medical triage, are they thinking I don’t have a fighting chance, or have they mentally passed me on to the next set of doctors?

My thoughts are jumbled and disturbing, my emotions in turmoil. Should I bother? Is anything worthwhile? This may not be a personal matter, but I am taking it personally. Yesterday I could think of design flaws. If women had one breast, the incidence of breast cancer would be cut by 50 percent. If breasts shriveled up and fell off after menopause, we could all have the breasts of choice. They could be like the Baroness Freytag von Loringhoven’s Dada designs, in the shape of pears and colored orange. Rather than pendulous, veined flesh, we could design humorous, decorative replacements. Why not?

It occurs to me that surgeons remove breasts to remove doubts. But in my case, the doctor removed only tissue and no doubts. As the breasts reduced in size, the doubts grew. Why can’t we excise doubts about our lives the way surgeons cut away breasts? Can I excise these doubts by writing about them? Physically, I am helpless; I can only subject myself to medical palliatives. Mentally, I must find some resolution, some peace, if only not to call into question the value of my husband’s and my children’s lives. I must wrestle and subdue the demons. I need a sense of order; meaning is beyond my reach. The image of Saint Agatha, standing serenely, even primly, holding out a small plate with her neat, severed breasts, comes to mind. I must be more like Saint Agatha and less like the tortured in hell.

In this time of uncertainty, two people have called. My husband told his friend and …a daughter-in-law, a nurse who knows the privacy laws, told her parents. The friend, whom I don’t know, suggested remedies, perhaps preventatives too late, but I readily embraced green tea and marmalade. The father didn’t know what to say. Disease becomes a reverse lottery left unsaid: Sorry it’s you; glad it’s not me. In cartoons the clouds of heaven are white and fluffy, like the white gloves I never wore, not angry, gray, and windblown. Rubens painted such moving clouds as signifiers of mutability, of the too rapid passage of human life, of contrast and conflict, of the drama of emotions. Would that I could feel his heroism, and not trite insignificance. (I’m not pretentious; I was an art historian and learned to think and feel in the similes and metaphors of art.)

Today is Saturday, a day free of frantic phone calls, of listening for the phone that doesn’t ring. I don’t have to attempt, unsuccessfully, to keep my granddaughter off the phone. The schedulers are never available; they expect you to be reachable at any time.

Sunday, May 9,