This Essay Is My Heart’s Song

“The Great Blue” by Kim Drew Wright

I’m gliding on my back atop a paddleboard, up the silent creek that swindles away from the Chesapeake Bay, becoming smaller, muddier, filled with creatures I can’t see but hear rustling in the marsh grass, slinking into the water with trepidatious splunks. Herons fly overhead, their great necks curved in a protective S, as if they are aware of the dangers of this world. I curl further into myself, the fear rising up from my gut until I turn with shaky arms to head back into open water.

We’ve rented a house with friends for my upcoming fiftieth birthday, arriving a few weeks after receiving the news that my triple-negative breast cancer has traveled out of my chest and into my fearful gut. My tan baseball cap is really a wig with two blonde braids to cover my baldness from my latest chemotherapy. It is still the pandemic, although nearing the end, and my friend, Linda, bemoans that we did not take advantage of the isolation before now. 

The house is immaculate, strong and large, yet welcoming, and sits in a cove embraced by the creek at its wider end. At the opposite end, fields littered with bright dandelions and red, spent shotgun shells stretch all the way to the one road that runs through the countryside, which we drive at dusk searching for foxes and deer. Pete, Linda’s husband, says, “I swear that was a mink that ran into the underbrush.” Near the water’s edge, tucked within our cove, is a small beach and a tree so wide and picturesque, even an adult—maybe especially an adult—would want to climb and rest in its branches. 

We play cornhole on the lawn. My oldest son comes up from college. My teenage daughter searches through drawers to scavenge for books. My youngest son, Elliott, is still young enough to wrestle with my friend’s son, who is his same age, on the giant floating mat we unroll and push out on the creek. We make fires in the pit outside and under the mantle inside. We light candles and eat Smith Island Cake that my friend ordered from a local baker. We ooh and ahh over its ten thin layers, chocolate cake and cream cheese icing dusted with cocoa powder. Linda battles my cancer recurrence with birthday decoration bling. “Not a day over fabulous” is strung over the bay window in the kitchen, framing the lawn and the water and the birds. There are matching T-shirts, tie-dyed in red, orange, and yellow. We blaze like the sun that circles my name on the front of the shirts; when we walk through waterfront restaurants, a grizzled local asks, “Who or what is Kim?” We use napkins with quotes like, “I have mixed drinks about feelings.” For once, I am not the only one who takes photos. Linda instructs Pete, “Take a picture of Kim with her pink wig . . . with her cake . . . with her son.” There are gifts. My husband, Wen, gives me an emerald on a silver chain. He writes “I love you more than words” on a napkin with my morning coffee, a favorite song lyric from our college years. They fill the space with vases of tulips, a nod to my wedding bouquet. We laugh a lot. Sometimes I think of the pain my absence will cause these people who love me and tears catch my breath. They rub my back. I am worried for each of my children, but I am still in the thick of mothering Elliott. I remind him daily to brush his teeth. I remind him daily he is loved.

At the end of April, it is the height of the great blue heron hatching season. A group of them is called a siege. They sweep over us and land atop the thin trees where they lay between two and six pale blue eggs. They nest in colonies called rookeries during breeding months. The parents take turns standing still at the water’s edge, waiting to spear fish with their deft bills. It takes about sixty days for the young to fledge, their strengthening wings growing to a span that can support them. Give them another month and they will have left the nest.

Elliott has grown a lot during the pandemic. In virtual school, he has had no one to compare his gains against, other than me. He asks, what seems like hourly, to stand back-to-back, measuring his growth against my stagnancy, waiting for the moment when he will officially surpass me. He is on the cusp of manhood, but he isn’t scared of the virus sweeping the world. When his face shows fear, he is always looking at me. In the middle of television shows, he asks, “Mama, are you okay?” I am not okay. I am afraid of my absorption into the great blue. I try to balance honesty with his need for security. We binge a lot of shows, locked inside our home. We start out with wholesome orphans on farms but end up on a string of violent dystopian thrillers. Both categories revolve around teenagers with dead mothers. I understand it strengthens the plot—the stakes are higher if there are no adults to protect them—but it does nothing to decrease the worried glances my son is sending my way. The characters are not worried about their mothers. They are trying to survive. Elliott studies my face, reading my body with something innate, passed down from one generation to the next. Is his knowledge of my decline ruining his tender ability to love? When we finish watching a season, I can’t help wondering if I will be here to watch the next season with him. 

April in Onancock, the idyllic Chesapeake town we half chose so we could make jokes about the name, is not our two families’ first trip together. Linda owns a timeshare on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, where we’ve spent several summers. We play board games and shop for knickknack creatures made out of sea glass, broken pieces worn down to beautiful. Our favorite tradition at the beach is ghost crab roulette. We wait for darkness to descend, grab small shovels and a plastic bucket, then head over the boardwalk to the day’s disheveled sand, where we squeal and clutch one another following the halo of flashlights. One brave soul scoops up the pale, almost translucent ghost crabs that dominate the beach after sunset. Our boys take turns daring each other to hold the bucket. When Elliott is not holding the bucket, he runs back to me and asks, “You okay, Mama?” On the boardwalk deck, we gather with the jittering bucket. Linda shouts, “Is everyone ready? One, two, three!” The winner is whoever is last to climb onto the bench seats, whoever can tolerate crabs skittering across toes the longest. I never win. I scream and jump before the bucket even gets tipped. 

During the last trip to the Outer Banks, I could barely make it to the beach, my lower back was hurting so badly. I didn’t know if it was simply pain from a soft mattress or the cancer’s spread. We had recently discovered my recurrence and were waiting for one of the top cancer hospitals to find room for me on their schedule. Later, my pain would be so great that I’d require morphine for an MRI at the emergency room, but until then, Linda was helping me hobble over the evening dunes when the call finally came. We embraced and cried, shouting hooray to the setting sun before heading back inside to our sons, fear and relief surging like the ocean as the ghost crabs scuttled back into their dens.

In Onancock, the only crabs are on our plates. We paddle in kayaks from the front yard to the town restaurant on the wharf for fresh fish and crab cakes. Another afternoon, I venture out alone on my paddleboard through the gentle town canal, silently sliding past neighbors who greet each other over lawns with have-you-heards and did-you-knows. It is like being inside a tranquil television show. I would like to be a part of this world. With each stroke, from my hand grip through my core, I am both joyful and acutely aware of my body’s fragile ability to navigate these waters. How much effort it takes, how easily it will be spent.

Heron calls are coarse, a wild dog barking, frog croaking, the throaty rasps of a jungle cat. They are not songbirds. Some species of birds, like the zebra finch and fairy-wren, are not only excellent singers, but sing to their babies before they even hatch. In fact, the superb fairy-wren slips a specific note into her song while brooding that serves as a security code her chicks sing back to her to ensure they are fed. The unique note varies per fairy-wren family, like a last name. The cuckoo bird will hide her own eggs in the wren’s nest to evade the obligation of feeding her young; the special note tells the mother wren which hatchlings are her own. It’s the secret key for identifying which ones to care for—which ones to love. 

In the mornings at Onacock, I take my coffee outside, where I write bad haikus about cancer and crabs. A quick storm comes up and we rush to stow the rented kayaks and oars before they can blow away. We are at the age when mothers start to fade. I have several friends who are wrestling with a parent’s decline. I want to be compassionate, but all I can think is, “If it’s this hard for you at fifty, then how the hell is my 14-year-old gonna handle it?” 

At the beginning of my recurrence, before the news of my stage four diagnosis, I have a lumbar puncture to see if the disease has penetrated my spine. Wen travels every week for work so Linda is my official driver. She feeds me spoonfuls of scrambled eggs from the hospital tray, because I am supposed to lay flat and still, but she keeps dropping them on my face. We are too loud for the curtained recovery area and I declare, “I’m gonna be the first person paralyzed from laughing so hard.” The nurse asks us to behave with a wink. Despite our laughter, I am frightened. During a panic moment, I grip Linda’s arm and implore her, “You have to make sure my kids are okay if I die.” I make her promise. She swears, “Your children are like my own.” But still, I can’t stifle my anxiety: Have I taught Elliott a song note that only fits my heart? I want to shout how unfair it all is but instead I am grasping at her arm. I am whispering to you, dear reader, for someone to hold him when I cannot.

The doctor who withdrew my spinal fluid brings me coffee in recovery. Although close to retirement, he is still full of wonder. Before the procedure, he asks if he can pray with me and holds my hand. He points to the x-ray of my spinal column and notes how it looks like little owl faces stacked one on top of the other. He explains the linings of the spine, pia mater and dura mater, Latin for fragile mother and strong mother. Afterward, he holds up a vial of my spinal fluid and it is clear as a spring day. 

It is the spring of Elliott’s fourteenth year. It’s been eight weeks since the oncologist told me I only had a handful of months to a few years to live. When we sat the kids down at the kitchen table, my daughter asked questions. My oldest son said everything would be alright. Elliott sat silent, tears running down his cheeks. When I asked him if he had any questions, he gave a slight shake of his head like a heron hovering on the water’s edge, frozen, waiting to pierce the truth. 

There is a hammock strung between the trees on the great lawn of the Onancock house, overlooking the water. Solo on the hammock I am stiff, limbs akimbo. When my son climbs in beside me, the counterweight balances, makes us soften and lean into each other, his perfect cheek beside mine. It is beautiful and he is beautiful and I want to stay with him forever. I don’t want to be the reason he hurts. I can’t stop my tears. He asks, “Mama, why are you crying?” I say, “I just think life is so beautiful. I love my life so much. I love you so much and I want to be here to share it with you.” It is a perfect horrible moment, staring up through the branches at the blue sky with his sweet warmth tucked in beside me, and he is too young for it and I am too young for it and yet this moment is here with us. I’m teaching my son that love is loss.

The great blue heron’s lifespan is fifteen years. They grow to a height of four feet with a wingspan of six to seven. Despite their size, their hollow bones mean they only weigh five or six pounds. How do they not get blown away? In Greek mythology, the mystical halcyon bird, our modern kingfisher, comes from the story of Alcyone and Ceyx. Alcyone’s grief turns her into a bird, so she can fly across the ocean to her drowned lover, Ceyx. She builds a floating nest to brood each winter on seas held calm by her father, Aeolus, God of the wind. How enviable to have the ability to calm the waters for your loved ones. 

It is hard dying of cancer. It is harder living with the knowledge of it. When do I become beautifully weathered like sea glass? My second port’s tubing runs taut under the skin of my neck, like I am permanently angry. I describe myself with the qualifier “used to be” before adjectives like fit and pretty. I have already lost my breasts. My hair grows back white as an egret. The new immunotherapy trial I start, to curb my recurrence, attacks my thyroid. I add synthetic thyroid pills to my morning routine. It attacks my pancreas. I pop pig digestive enzymes when I eat. I bond with other women through the stage four breast cancer social media group. They die. I snap at my family, whoever is in the house. Sometimes I think of my childhood dog, Ginger, a fifteen-year-old cocker spaniel that wandered off one day and didn’t come back. How my father said, “Sometimes old dogs go off to die alone.” I drive to a park and stare at the trees through the windshield. I wonder how sinking into the woods might feel. I do an internet search on how long it takes for hypothermia to kill you. I think of my children. I go home.

I make our house a shrine before I am even gone. I hang photos of our family on beaches. I surround my bed with mementos of our time together. A “50 years loved” cake topper from Onancock glitters on my nightstand, reminding me I am lucky. People tell me that I must always be grateful. It’s been three years since the start of the pandemic and masks are mostly gone. Today, if your loved one is dying, you can be there to say goodbye. 

Now Elliott is sixteen, but he is still my baby. The only one of my children who’s never awkward blowing me an air kiss and saying, “I love you more.” My snuggler. The one I’ve always said will make a great husband one day. He got his driver’s license this week. Nine months ago, when I took him to the DMV for his learner’s permit test, there was another boy standing at the counter. He held a bag of donuts. He told the woman behind the plexiglass, “I failed, again. This is my second time. How long do I have to wait to retake it?”

Elliott joked with a hint of nerves in his voice, “What if I don’t pass?”

When he finished, I paid and signed the paperwork. I took a photo of him with the temporary paper license by the DMV door. On the drive home we passed the other boy walking dejectedly along the busy road with his paper bag.

“I bet he bought those donuts to celebrate, thinking he would pass his driver’s test. I bet he thought he’d be driving home. I feel bad for him,” I said.

“I feel bad for him, too.”

“Well, maybe this will make him study harder and do better next time.”

A few miles went by.

Then Elliott replied, “You know the saddest part isn’t that he didn’t pass or that he’s walking now. The saddest part is that he didn’t have anyone there with him.”

When Elliott gets into the Jeep for his first solo drive, he shoos us back inside off the front porch and Wen and I sneak photos from the window. He’s drifting out of the driveway, away from the house we moved into when I was pregnant with him, and the yard is overgrown because it is too much for us to keep up with, and although we are not nestled in an idyllic cove, I feel akin to the heron sitting atop the great tree in her stick nest. I imagine that relief washes through her heart as she watches her fledgling soar away, into the great blue, where my mother’s call is ringing. I’m sorry. I love you. Are you okay? Will you be okay? Please be okay.

In its way, this essay is my love song to Elliott, but it’s coming out coarse, inadequate, sounding like anything but a love song. May he still recognize the call. May he find his way home even when I’m long gone.

I am waiting on another call to schedule a biopsy on a new spot that’s “concerning for metastasis.” It sounds like it’s in the same spot as my earlier back pain and I wonder if cancer has been lurking there all along.

There’s a cardinal trapped in our garage. It must have flown in when my husband was grilling the night before and now it doesn’t know how to get out. I leave the garage door open, wanting it to have a chance. I check for messages in my patient portal. I insert the foam breast prosthesis into my mastectomy bra and pull it on to go pick up prescriptions from the pharmacy. When I return, the cardinal is gone, and I close the door behind me.

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