The best idea I’ve had all week involved less thinking.

Tata: Darla, can I get you a glass of wine?

I have to guess for a minute: it’s Wednesday? It’s Wednesday. Dad relocated from the couch to a rented hospital bed in the living room, which is good because he’s more comfortable. His liver is failing and it’s terminal. I have no idea how long something like that takes to kill a person but he looks pretty damn good. I said so.

Tata: Dad, you look pretty damn good.
Dad: Don’t believe it.

He’s always been a good actor. Most of my family is here at Dad’s and Darla’s house. We are kind of climbing all over one another and anxious to help. This morning, Auntie InExcelsisDeo, who is taking this very hard, needed to get out of the house for a bit so she and I walked to the end of the driveway. It’s about a mile and a half. We returned to find my sister Daria and her husband Tyler directing the assembled cousins, siblings and spouses in a hive-like effort to clean up Dad’s half-finished oils and vinegars for the spring market season.

Tata: What are you doing?
Daria: Dad said, “Lazy people! Get off your saggy butts and go clean frozen shit out of the garage!”
Tata: Good thing freakish upper body strength is apparently genetic.

We dragged milk crates and boxes out of the garage and into the driveway, which is an absolutely great idea because the house is in the Shenandoah Valley. The backyard, if you can call it a backyard, is a cow path. A little while ago I was talking on the phone to a friend and made eye contact with a passing cow, which seldom happens in New Brunswick – I mean it, almost never. Last night, on our way up the lengthy driveway, nine, ten, maybe a dozen deer crossed our path, staring at us. They were not afraid. Darla said the deer live here because Dad doesn’t shoot them, so it’s personal. Up here, in this section of the valley near Staunton, Virginia, wildlife is right outside the door, munching on something. Fortunately, we’ve left it frost-damaged condiments.

Tonight, we sat with Dad in the living room, all of us: his wife, his second wife, three of this daughters, his sister, his two nieces, his son-in-law, his granddaughter, his grandson-in-law. My brother and his family will arrive Friday morning. Tonight, I sat on the end of his bed, with my hand on his leg. My baby sister Dara, all of fifteen, sat on the other side, touching his other leg. My other sister Daria was holding his hand. Daria directed the conversation for about an hour, and it was so funny we were all crying from laughter, even Dad. This is what he has always liked best about the family: we are a riot, an utter riot. In an unguarded moment, we were all telling on each other, which I had never imagined happening, not even with a special prosecutor.

Tata: We’ve all got GOODYEAR stamped on our asses from being thrown under the bus.

We agreed that one of our finest moments as a group was Miss Sasha’s bridal shower, which Dad catered, and it really was. Dad could hardly breathe, he was laughing so hard. We all held our collective breath for a second, though he was smiling broadly.

Dad: Spaghettios!
Tata: What?

Everyone remembered at once. Dad and Daria are catering professionals. They’d built a banquet table of considerable Italian charm and elegance. Rustic touches lay everywhere, like artisan loaves of bread and decorative grasses. Because Dad is a prankster of the first order: a bain marie tray of Spaghettios.

Everyone: Spaghtettios!

A few minutes later, Darla closed the doors to the living room to let Dad sleep. Everyone’s in the kitchen, laughing and crying. I don’t have to see it to know. I know. And my heart aches.

I’m leaving tonight and I don’t know when I’ll be back.

Dance first. Think later. It’s the natural order.
– Samuel Beckett.

For me, the answers have always been in the body. My solution to emotional distress has always been lifting weights or dancing or calisthenics or cycling or athletic sex. When I am acting like myself, if I am miserable and in motion, I’m working through it. One of the lessons of depression was that my body, which had turned on me before, could betray me completely in the form of bad brain chemistry. Subsequently, I discovered I could also fatten up alarmingly. When I look at myself now and think I should lose 25 pounds, I feel betrayed, but wonder by whom?

The human body is a leaky vessel.
– Ta

This morning, Mom emailed the family an NPR journal by Larry Sievers called My Cancer, pointing in particular to paragraphs 2-4. I was unfamiliar with Mr. Sievers or the journal. Let’s see:

I’ve been a journalist virtually my entire adult life. I’ve also been a baker, a short-order cook, a chicken delivery boy. I’ve taught. I dabbled in the human rights world briefly. I tried and failed to write a book. All that seems dwarfed by the cancer.

Now I find myself about to embark on another part of this strange journey. I have been undergoing a relatively new procedure called Radio Frequency Ablation. They stick a needle into your lung, your liver, wherever the tumor is. The needle actually pierces the tumor. Then they burn it out from the inside. Kill it. Something that people undergoing chemo can only dream of. I’ve seen the scans, seen the black holes where my tumors were.

At first, I thought we were talking about Mom’s identity as a cancer survivor. This interested me because it would never occur to me now to identify myself by my disease or malady since my seeking treatment for depression was an abject failure. So I wondered if Mom, who wears a Live Strong bracelet, was referring to Mr. Sievers’ thoughts two paragraphs later:

And when that’s done, when the last tumor has been turned into ash, what am I then? Will I be somebody who used to have cancer? I think most cancer patients don’t ever think it’s really gone. It’s just hiding, waiting to jump out and scare us when we least expect it. Will I be able to resume my old life? To rebuild my battered body into what it was before? I don’t know. But I know this disease has changed me dramatically in so many ways. I am a different person. Hopefully a better person. You cannot go through an ordeal like this and not be profoundly affected.

If I’m cancer free, does that mean I’m not part of cancer world, the community in which I have found so much comfort and strength? I don’t know the answers to any of these questions. I just know that once again I will be a stranger in a strange land. But I will still be someone whose life was changed in every way by the monster we call cancer.

But Mom wasn’t thinking of herself. Maybe the experimental treatment might help Dad, she thought, which is remarkable. At times, Mom and Dad have had the most acrimonious divorce I’ve ever seen. Then again, Dad’s heart attack caused Mom a lot of sorrow. Who knows what the failure of another’s body may mean to us?

I spent hours yesterday afternoon dancing, which is to say stepping inside music to get out of my brain. After the hysterectomy years ago, I woke up to find my doctor sleeping in a chair at the foot of my bed. My surgery had not gone as planned, and he was worried. I wanted to go home, so I sat up in bed without using my hands. He said should have been impossible – except I just didn’t believe my body was weak, so it wasn’t. And though I am in pain nearly all the time to some degree, as arthritic people may be, I cannot see myself as anything but temporarily inconvenienced. Pain is not important. Dancing is everything, is life.

What am I to do, then, with the frailties of other bodies in the quiet of time?

I made the mistake of waking up happy this morning. The sun was shining, NBC-TV promised 55 degrees, and I felt pretty good, so I was completely pissed that I had nothing to complain about. Damn it. I expect a certain level of flavorful misery, and if things are looking up, I’m waiting for pigeon poop. Perplexed, I left the apartment at noon, walked to town, to the library, where I retrieved something I’d left at work yesterday, then I walked to the health food store. By then, my hair was floating above my head like a fuzzy bronze cloud and my eyes were so irritated by something in the air I was trying to walk up Route 27 with my eyes closed. Fortunately, I spent my childhood pretending I was Helen Keller, so even that was nothing to complain about, but I arrived at the health food store determined to discuss homeopathic medicines for wanting to kill your sister and found the Chinese medicine practitioners missing. Only a teenage boy was evident, and he wastes his youth pretending not to follow me through the store. I like him. He’s very sweet. But I’m not having a conversation with him like –

Tata: Do you have a homeopathic remedy for when my sister is a complete bitch?
Boy: Only if she’s imaginary, and we’d need third party confirmation of that, ma’am.

– so I walked across the street in the glorious sunlight to the Extortion Mart and couldn’t find baking pans. At last, something to complain about, and not even finding foil pans stopped me. I’ll be baking every week. I might need pans – and no one should forget it!

Two and a half hours after I left the house, I arrived home and checked messages. Daria and I had talked on the phone twice before noon, but she’s nothing if not thorough.

Daria: Darla updated the blog, they’re getting ready to leave the hospital and Fifi needs a nap. Peace out, dog.

Though I was desperate to talk with Dad again, I took my cue from the toddler and lay down for a nap. Dad and Darla would need some time to settle in, I thought. Some time passed –

…feelings! nothing more than feelings! trying to forget my…

– and after the musical interlude, I called Dad’s house.

Tata: I’m relieved that you’re home from the hospital.
Dad: So you are crazed with worry?
Tata: I’m keeping my cards close to my vest. Speaking of my vest, there’s a man resisting my otherworldly appeal. If you will.
Dad: Is he exceptionally stupid?
Tata: Thanks, Daddy! I’ll call you tomorrow.

I’ve got no complaints at all.

We’re having an office cleaning day! I’m wearing sweats because I anticipate climbing on top of and under things. The comfy clothes proved less comfy than usual when I got to work this morning completely soaked because cotton jersey absorbs water like you wouldn’t believe, especially when you crouch down and make yourself a nice, round target. This morning, another of my tires was flat, though I can’t remember if that makes Flat No.5 or 6. I’m having a pretty good day so I’m telling you: you haven’t lived until you’ve inflated a tire in a forty degree driving rain.

I have four sisters.

Daria is sixteen months younger than me. We have both parents and one brother in common. Daria and I are as different as two exactly alike people can be. You would never guess we were blood relations until we started laughing or swearing. Daria looks just like our brother Todd, so as my cousin and hairdresser Carmello recently said, “They had milkmen back then. How do you feel about dairy?”

Anya is six years younger than me. We have no parents in common. When my mother and her father got together, Anya was very young. She doesn’t remember a time before I kept trying to make her hair curl. Anya’s politics are further left than mine; she is a driven business owner. Men fall at Anya’s feet, which amuses Anya’s husband Dan.

Corinne and Anya share parents. They have fair skin and blue eyes, and yet, they resemble different parents. Anya and Corinne finish each other’s sentences. Corinne is so funny you think you heard wrong. She and Anya own the family store with their mother and a toy store besides. I am so lucky!

Dara is fifteen and a half; Dad’s daughter by his statuesque second wife. Dara is smart and funny and so, so teenage. Last summer, we had a big old combined family weekend and the whole family took a deep breath and turned purple when Dara put on a pink bikini. A week after Dara was born, I found Anya in a bar with a picture of a baby, “It’s my sisters’ sister!”

I mention this now because I’m on the verge of drawing you the character chart I always wanted when I read Russian novelists for this reason:

February 7: Dan
February 15: Me
March 1: Anya
March 16: Corinne
April 1: Todd
April 8: Miss Sasha

Daria wants things normal. Dan is surprised when people notice he has a birthday. Anya and Corinne have always shared a celebration that included Irish music and hearing loss. Each time my terrified family has tried to celebrate my birthday, something bizarre has happened. It’s been almost two horrifying weeks. I’m fully prepared to let it go.

Dara’s birthday is in July and by then, maybe things will have returned to some kind of normal. For now, let’s skip the genoise and fall straight into industrial-strength Green Beer In A Drum.

Dad’s in the hospital, which turns out to be a good thing because the women of my family cope best with bleach.

Miss Sasha: Mommy! My husband’s upset! My grandpa’s sick! My great-grandpa’s sick! Gramma’s sick! What do I do?
Tata: Pull on rubber gloves, darling, and scour something to within an inch of its life.
Miss Sasha: What? Why?
Tata: Because ours is the way of the scrub brush, and you have the mop-fu in your blood!
Miss Sasha: I am the chosen one!
Tata: The path of the clean oven is open to you. But first, you must snatch this chore boy from my closing fist!
Miss Sasha: Mom, you’re a thousand miles and a whole time zone away. If you mail me that chore boy I might clean something by Sunday.
Tata: Right. Sorry! I’ll lay off the Zatoichi films, okay?

It dawned on me the other day that three of my closest friends have lost a parent to cancer or heart attack, and Trout’s S.O. is being treated at Sloan Kettering. My sisters are frantic for a variety of reasons. Daria and Auntie InExcelsisDeo drove to Virginia this morning to clean Dad’s and Darla’s house to CDC standards. It’s hard to find people to talk with in New Jersey who haven’t lost parents or close relatives to a suspicious disease. Trying to talk this over with my friends dredges up the old memories for them. So guess what?

You could build computers in my bathroom.

Resolved: Cream cheese is Nature’s most perfect food.

Tata: You will never guess – not in a million years! – what sits in my fridge. Right now! As we speak!
Siobhan: Drew Barrymore?
Tata: Maybe next week…
Siobhan: What happened? Where did you go shopping?
Tata: Costco! I love their politics! And guess what’s in my fridge! GUESS!
Siobhan: A bale of crinkle cut fries?
Tata: A THREE POUND BUCKET OF CREAM CHEESE!
Siobhan: You’ve gone too far! How dare you lie about something as important as dairy products?
Tata: I could never lie about cheese!
Siobhan: So it’s real? A three pound bucket of cream cheese would be a new reason to live!
Tata: Cream cheese goes with everything!
Siobhan: Fruit? Yup. Avocado? Indeed.
Tata: It makes an excellent dip…
Siobhan: I could use it in meatloaf.
Tata: And Jell-O.
Siobhan: It might be a mistake in sushi rolls but I’ve seen it on menus.
Tata: It might prove a refreshing accent to an earthy liver pate.
Siobhan: Can you think of anything you couldn’t find a way to use cream cheese with?
Tata: What? I quit thinking and paired it with a spoon.

Knowing the place in my heart held by cream cheese, you are fully prepared to imagine my horror, frustration and tingling joy when I discovered this product.

I may openly weep.

• With new PHILADELPHIA Ready-To-Eat Cheesecake Filling, you can make a delicious cheesecake dessert in just one, easy step – no baking or setting required!
• Just spread the filling into a graham cracker crust and you’ll have a wonderful family dessert, even on the busiest weeknight.

Flavors: Classic Cheesecake

Are you fucking kidding me? I can’t picture myself leaving the dairy aisle without wearing a heavy slick of this stuff down the front of me. I bet half the women I know saw the commercials, fell into a trance and picked up their car keys, which they will not remember when they wake up in rehab.

Oh, and while we’re pondering desperation, it seems my brother Todd may be trying to kill me in retalliation for using him as my personal guinea pig for the first fifteen years of his life. Hey, it was for SCIENCE. And he recovered, right? So why, Flying Spaghetti Monster, why did he send this?

Bonus points for referring to Rick James as “that boy.” To quote a very young Bill Cosby: “And the pain…was tremendous.”

Last night, in the Virtual Bar at Shakespeare’s Sister, Marked Hoosier introduced the assembled to the utter horror that is Celine Dion covering AC/DC’s You Shook Me. I responded pretty much as you might expect:

No no no no! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGHH!

Clear!
K-CHUNK!
Clear!
K-CHUNK!
Clear!
K-CHUNK!

Nothing!

Right, so I pretended to be everyone’s pet zombie, but only if I could have a pink collar with a little bell so I don’t sneak up on birds. Any exposure to Celine Dion makes me want to kill myself but I forgot all about the tasty brains of the living until this afternoon, when I stumbled on a terrifying cable offering called Bake Decorate.

This is not food. This is what happens when you stop listening to your body whisper sweet nothings when filled with fresh fruit, vegetables and high quality proteins. This is what happens when you hunger for illusions. This is what happens when you think green beans come out of a can. Don’t eat this! It’s disgusting! And while I’m ranting, what the fuck is wrong with people that they teach their children that white flour-sugar-butter combinations are even better with sprinkles and goddamn frosting? Why not just hack open their little rib cages and spackle their arteries with yummy lard?

Some things just aren’t good for us, like Celine Dion and food with all the nutrition magically sucked out and replaced with fat and sugar. That stuff’ll kill ya. Then again, some thngs offer gritty nourishment and kickass sustenance, like Melissa Etheridge climbing out of her presumed deathbed to show us how hard you can work at being alive. It’s just a cover song. It’s real and filling and raw.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go chase some delicious birdies.

If you’ve ever snapped a bone, split it or twisted, chances are good you have your own internal weathervane. The spot I fractured in my foot predicts precipitation fairly well, but, strangely, my sinuses are better than Doppler Radar. I can be going about my business and – whammo! – blinding, crushing pain cuts me down. Most times, if I screw my eyes shut for thirty seconds to three minutes, the pain burns off like a fog under the morning’s first rays, and I know it’s going to rain. I don’t take anything for it. Whoosh! Gone! What happened?

Sometimes, like tonight, the rain’s fallen, the clouds moved on and what Siobhan and I refer to as The Headache remains. Yesterday started out pretty well. Mom answered the phone when I called at 8:45 a.m. because the telemarketers are still annoying their own families. She was still gooey from anesthesia and Tuesday’s procedure. Her friend Erin was just walking up the steps to Mom’s bedroom with a book. Tom was off to work, Erin was staying. Mom wasn’t supposed to be alone after surgery, which she hadn’t told me. Anyway, Mom was making woozy jokes about …something… and that was good news. I waited a few hours and called Dad’s house, where his fab wife Darla answered but she was still sleeping. I promised to call back later.

When I talked to Dad after 2, he was cranky, swearing, firm in his opinions and scathing in his assessments. In other words: he sounded great. I told him if he stopped swearing I’d be really worried. We had a lovely conversation, during which I laughed a great deal. Then Darla sent out a group email stating that she’d started a blog, where you will be nice, damn it, to keep all kinds of people informed about Dad’s treatment. I was thrilled. Then I read the words “[Dad’s] life expectancy is between a couple of months and a couple of years, depending on how he tolerates, and how well he responds to, treatment.”

I didn’t take that well.

The rest of my day was pretty well screwed at that point. I lay down to nap after work and sat up straight when fear shot all through me. Later, I called my brother Todd.

Tata: You’re going to work in a few hours, right?
Todd: Hey! You remembered!
Tata: I didn’t until a little while ago. I panicked and went to the liquor store for a bottle of wine. While I was there, I asked the clerk what day it was. So that’s the only reason I know.
Todd: Don’t let go of that Slinky!
Tata: …always good advice, but what prompted it?
Todd: I was talking to my daughter, who’s got a Slinky by the end her baby brother’s not holding.
Tata: Baby brothers are science projects. You ought to know that better than most.
Todd: I’ll always treasure the memory of you putting ExLax in my Halloween candy.
Tata: I had to do it – for SCIENCE!
Todd: Remind me to send SCIENCE a bag of flaming dog poop.

Todd reminded me that Happy Hour comes but once a day, and we have but a short time on this earth. So drink up! This was excellent advice on an evening I felt like I’d stuck my hand in a socket over and over, and when I feel this shitty, I do something about it. So last night, like every night for over a week, I lit a candle and asked whoever was listening for fucking strength. Since I am completely aware that I know absolutely nothing, I don’t want to offend anyone by calling them someone else’s name, which everyone knows is terrible form –

You: Oh baby baby you really do it for me, Tory…
Pat: I’m Pat. Oh, and so outta here.
You: This here is a valuable life lesson. Shit!

– so I just ask anyone who’s listening for help, damn it! Help! I put down the candle. I sat on the couch and typed something. Ten minutes later, the phone rang. A woman who rescues stray cats called to tell me she’d found two cats together, and they could be available in mid-March, and would I mind if they were both black? I burst into tears, which has become my indoor-outdoor sport, and said yes yes yes.

There was nothing else to do but stand in the middle of my living room and say, “Thank you. Thank you.” So I did.