Yes or No

Finding my way towards a “yes, and.”

The surgeon wrote the three letter word on my left leg a few minutes before they knocked me out to excise another piece of my vaginal wall. It was a complication from fistula surgery in October, which was a complication from abscesses two years ago, which was a complication from chemo.

Three letters in purple permanent marker.

Yes

They do it to make sure they operate on the correct side. I think that’s what she said as she wrote it, anyway. She had already given me the happy drugs.

I’ve tried to scrub the word off my leg in the shower every day for a week. The three letters are still there, faded. I feel like a slightly less murderous Lady MacBeth.

When I woke up from surgery I was crying. I was crying the kind of deep tears that feel heavier than your own, the kind that feel like they come up through the earth with boulders attached to them, too much to bear and you sink. The kind that go on for days and threaten to drown you in a subterranean tempest teeming with fear, grief, despair, self-pity, loneliness, death. I was crying before they told me that the surgery didn’t go as planned, and I may need another surgery, another specialist. I was crying because my body felt the grief before my head was even back online.

I am feeling a lot of grief, in my body and otherwise, these days. This was predictable. My oncologist warned me that cancer gets mentally harder for many right after you finish your treatment. But I had been processing! I was in therapy! I was giving myself gold stars, as my friend Jill would say. (Jill passed two weeks ago from metastatic cancer. Read the obituary we wrote together before she died here. What a woman. I miss her. Fuck cancer.)

When I stopped working a little over a month ago I don’t think I knew what was actually happening. I thought I simply couldn’t function. Burnout. I needed a break. Duh.

I didn’t realize that it was some future self coming to pluck me off the cliff against my will and mouth the word “no” like a ventriloquist because I didn’t have the strength to say that little word out loud for myself.

No. Definitions:

determiner - not any; as in, not any fucks left to give.

noun - a negative answer or decision; as in, no I will not do that thing I don’t want to do anymore.

adverb - not at all, to no extent; as in, To no extent am I am able carry on like before.

No is also the opposite of yes, the lack of consent:

No, I did not consent to losing my breasts.

No, I did not consent to poisoning myself with “life-saving” medicine.

No, I did not consent to a fistula rendering my remaining female body part deformed and dysfunctional. As above now, so is below.

And no, I definitely did not consent to losing so much time to disease and being in bed and watching my children awaken to the fact that I and they are afflicted with the very inflexible condition of being mortal.

No. No. No. NO! Do you hear me? I did not consent to any of this!

The yes on my leg keeps staring back at me challenging this story.

The truth is I don’t think I have ever fully consented to being mortal. Not really. Not in my bones. I’m winding my way there, on a slow, circuitous route maybe after two years of facing it head on. But I’m still kicking and screaming about it. There is still monumental resistance. I don’t want to die, ever. I don’t want to put my sweet dogs down - it takes my breath away when I think about that future moment. I don’t want my parents to die in the next fifteen years but odds are pretty damn high, and there isn’t one thing I can do about it. The indescribable intoxication of laying my two teary eyes on my sleeping children exists only in relief to the shattering and unchangeable uncertainty of what the next moment may bring.

“No, I do not consent to that,” screams the panicking mama bear animal inside me desperately holding their faces wanting to simply merge with them so we can never ever be apart even in death. No!

Consent, a yes, implies a choice. As humans, consent and acceptance of our human condition is implicit in the beginning, until suddenly it isn’t. It happens to each of us at different ages and for different reasons. And then, one way or another, if we are among the lucky ones, we find ourselves choosing yes so desperately that we beg and plead and negotiate for more time.

Somewhere deep inside of me I did consent to lose the breasts, take the poison, pass the time of illness in bed, do the surgeries…because I wanted to live. I do choose to love my children, and parents, and husband, and friends, and family, and the damn short-lived pets so damn much because…Yes! 1000 times yes I consent to being mortal over the alternative! And…

Yes, and… being human is hard. Each day we have to re-consent to our circumstances, dive into that subterranean abyss that threatens to eat us whole, and resurface.

For now, all I have to do is look down at my leg and those three little letters and surrender to the inevitable truth of them.