Ladder
by Joseph Bardin

In Memoriam, Bernadeane

This is where we did not want to be. For ten years Bernie’s lived with breast cancer, and we could always say but she is doing well, living her life, but now her back pain gets so bad she can’t get out of bed and when she can it is with a walker. And we can no longer look at it as separate from the cancer, since lesions have appeared on her spine. 

The pain is hard to bear, for me. I find myself suffering right alongside her as if it’s me who can’t move. I’m not feeling back pain—I know all about that from my own ordeal with a ruptured disc years ago. What I’m feeling is the sadness of Bernie being in pain, unhappy, struggling. 

For someone as opinionated, and even prickly as I can be, it’s strange to admit, but I am an empath. Starting in my forties and now in my fifties, I bridge easily into the emotions of others, and feel them, sometimes more than I want to. And I tear up with others, spontaneously, including only moderately well rendered characters in mediocre movies, which is irritating at the same time. 

Rather than the kind that voids their own personality to be a blank canvas for the feelings of other, I’m an empath with attitude, but my attitude now is a sorrow that mirrors Bernie’s, which is becoming tinged with the treachery of despair, a cold current that draws her toward darkness and which threatens my own equilibrium of optimism, as if despair was always there waiting to be activated, the emotional mechanism by which we give up, blacking out any way forward, darkening all stages. 

Do animals experience enough hope to feel hopelessness? Or are they simply surviving until their survival runs outs, which they innately know, and their animal minds are not abstract enough to see other possibilities, and then they see nothing. 

But it is in our biology to fight for every breath, to fan the life force from deep within. Before thought, beneath the constructs of language even, comes the covenant with life, which we strain to fulfill, with or without conscience consent. Thirteen years ago, I was in emergency surgery for a life-threatening staph infection in my spine, and while my anesthetized mind knew nothing, my bodily being insisted on its continuity, fighting for life pulse by pulse. 

But the mind makes its own calculations about what is probable and tolerable and possible, and this truth, the truth of death, pitted against the organic life urge can spin a downward sucking whirlpool of struggle. 

Bernie says things like, “I don’t know why this is happening,” as if cancer is a why question, her slate gray eyes looking up at me from the bed like some kind of wild creature defeated by her cage. 

Some people adapt to sickness, some excel at it, like my grandmother Miriam who would visit us when I was a kid and comfortably never leave the bed until it was time to go home. She’d listen to her stack of books on tape, and philosophize on subjects my eight-year-old brain couldn’t grasp, and then signal me to close the door so she could broadcast her ESP my way, which I never quite received. 

Bernie isn’t made for living within the bounds of illness. She spent the last two years defying her condition by over-doing it at every turn, pushing rather than resting, bending and lifting the moment her back didn’t stop her with pain, burning every fiber of bounce back in her body, so that each recovery lost spring on the last, until now there isn’t any.   

She’s complained about each pain and inconvenience and indignity along the way, hating it and hating it out loud so that I sometimes couldn’t stand it, and fought her over it, demanding she find something positive to say, something, as she glared back at me like I was a fool who didn’t get it, didn’t get it at all. But now she’s gone quiet, watching hours of CNN, “the worry channel” I call it, in a manner that makes me ask her over and over, how are you doing, how are you doing, because I need something from her, something. 

But she just shakes her head, angry at the interruption, as if one hour of CNN isn’t the same as the next, angry at the room, angry at the bars of afternoon sunlight through the shutters stacked on our bed, angry at me for wanting something from her that isn’t forthcoming—but really she is heartbroken. Bernie loves to work and move and shop and visit friends and clean the yard, and almost any action that presents itself, and that love migrated me out of the cool shell of mind I’d hidden in, into the fleshy life, the higher life of physicality, from which disease is forcing her to withdraw.    

I feel like the proverbial frog that couldn’t sense the heat gradually being turned up on the pan, until it finds itself being boiled. Did we miss it on treatment? Chemotherapy, even fractional chemo, devastated her, so we moved to gentler alternatives. But were they too gentle? Current oncology still feels like a medieval mix of torture and juju, forcing us to choose between assaulting the cancer while beating down Bernie, or protecting Bernie but also giving safe passage to the malignancy. 

Now I’m simmering in her grief as well. I can’t pull Bernie out if I’m in it with her, but it feels like betrayal or belittling her suffering or simply being a superficial asshole to look past what she’s going through, even in order to see better days, which is hopefully where we are headed. Also, I worry that if I worry less I will miss something critical to preventing what I’m worrying about happening. This merry-go-round logic of worry makes easing up even a little an act of wanton recklessness akin to driving with your eyes closed, and who would do that? 

Showers take on the stress and drama of a professional wrestling match. I get in with Bernie, trying to rush her through shampooing and soaping and rinsing as her energy rapidly dwindles, which she resists—Bernie never likes being rushed—as if she can luxuriate in the water like she used to. Bernie loves water. 

My anxiety spikes with each added unnecessary moment and poorly chosen movement on her part, disregarding her debilitated state, until I am the bad guy, threatening terrible things if we don’t get a move on, and she is the good guy fighting for her life, liberty, and pursuit of a longer rinse. She makes it back to bed so drained she’s almost nauseous and I’m exhausted too, and in the sudden quiet, I have to laugh with relief at having completed the task, and at how wound up we’d both gotten. Bernie brightens immediately—she loves my laughter more than anything. 

Bernie is hardly at death’s door, but we’re lower than I’d hoped we’d ever go, and what may be failing is our grasp on a life that is larger than cancer, more expansive than just survival.  

In the middle of all this I drive into a serious car accident. It’s profligate, really, to make more trouble in a troubled time, by running a yellow as it apparently turns red, and getting smashed by a car swinging left off the freeway, pushing me right into oncoming traffic, until I come to a halt, the driver’s door buckled, airbags blown, facing oncoming cars that don’t hit me. 

As it happened, I said fuck, fuck, fuck out loud, fully aware of my mistake, my fear, my regret to be spinning through smashed glass on collapsing tires, instead of just driving home, which I could so easily have done had I stopped at that light. Then when the car completed its chaotic gymnastics, and the eternal flow of traffic started sorted itself out around me, I took inventory of my head, arms and legs, and I said “I’m OK.” 

And I am OK.  I do well to walk away from that crash with a case of sideways whiplash, which I bring to a therapist who has helped me with the perpetual neck-lash of being a writer. 

She explains that the body is a master warrior shielding wanton blows from critical organs by deflecting their impact to tendons and ligaments and tiny sinews, all invested with the intelligence and purpose of the whole. We curse aches in our body when they are protecting us from worse. 

There is this connective tissue, called fascia, that surrounds and embraces all that is human life, and is constantly shape-shifting, a scaffolding come alive, to support, to hold, to defend the physical form that we are. In the fascia, evolution and the miraculous are one, and given such endowments, natural and supernatural simultaneously, is it any wonder that we dream of forever in our hearts?

The treatment is a little like a massage and then nothing like a message, as the therapist accesses the fascia, and sort of just holds, which has some kind of releasing or unlocking effect on the fascia, but also apparently on the brain, which needs to get out of the way, so I drop, with no warning, into to these short, moments of sleep. During one of these I have a vision of Bernie, almost doll-sized, climbing up my ribs, like a ladder, and with each rung she grows in strength and health, until she is face to face with me, full-sized and strong, and we embrace, and hold each other. 

It confirms what I know, but also clarifies what I must do. Feeling what she’s feeling right along with her makes me a jungle gym not a ladder. To be a way up for her, I have to be vertical, rising myself. I can’t be a receiver for her suffering, a mirror, an amplifier. I tell her, and she loves it, because she needs a vision too, of how to get out of where she is, and we cry a few tears together. 

Inspired by Bernie’s instinctive openness, I’ve spent decades thawing my nervous system, resetting the capacity to feel that had turned off in me. But now sharing in Bernie’s pain only magnifies it, and I have to remove myself from that flow, even when my heart hurts for her, and the cup of sadness wants to spill over, so that in me, she can find footing to climb. 

Joseph Bardin is an essayist and playwright based in Arizona by way of Trenton, NJ, Washington DC, and Tel Aviv. He is the author of the essay collection Outlier Heart, (IFERS Press). His essays have appeared in numerous publications including Interim, Louisville Review, The Dramatist, Superstition Review, and Eclectica, and been anthologized in the Transhumanism Handbook (Springer). His plays have been performed both domestically and abroad. A scholarship alumni of the Valley Community of Writers, he is a member of the Dramatists Guild. (www.josephbardin.com). @joebardin.

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