On memory and association

I feel a little like I've been here before

In ancient Celtic tradition, the end of October is a liminal time when the boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead can be more easily crossed. Maybe this is why I’m drawn to October for all my major rites of passage.

“You can’t use that in here,” says the woman to my right a couple chairs down. I am sitting in a small waiting room with my phone in my hand.

I look around quickly (was she talking to me?) then look back down at my cellphone, scrolling up the screen repeatedly with my thumb.

“No really, see the sign on the door?” I glance at the sign that reads: No Cellphone Use along with a cartoon cellphone slashed through with a diagonal line and circle around it.

“I don’t mean to be rude, but it messes with the equipment. You can’t do that,” she says.

(maybe she really is talking to me)

“Doesn’t the sign mean they just don’t want you talking on your phone in here?” I say, and place my phone upside down on the chair beside me.

“That’s not true,” says the blonde woman in a whisper through her mask shaking her head. She squints her eyes at me. As if in solidarity, she whips out her own cellphone and starts to text. The woman directly across on the other side of the room takes out hers as well and looks down.

I break eye contact with them all and look out the skinny window, staring out at the scaffolding set up around the building across the street. Only the tops of the Ionic columns are visible, propping up the roof of an imposing medical structure.

I read somewhere once that the ancient Greeks designed these columns inspired by the slender curves of the female body. Judging from the stockiness of the four of us middle-aged women, each sitting appropriately spaced and with our arms crossed to keep our royal blue cotton shirts closed, I think the Greeks probably were thinking of a much younger female form.

We four sit in silence and look at our phones.

Pretty soon, each of the women are escorted out of the room one at a time by technicians wearing powder blue scrubs. None of them return. I am left seated in the waiting room alone. This feels familiar.

I scroll through my messages and reread a text I sent to my ex-husband Jim a couple days ago.

“It’s October 8 today,” I said.

“I can’t believe you just sent me that,” he said. “I was going to send it, too, but then I thought you would say, ‘So what?’”

“No I wouldn’t, I’d never say ‘So what,’” I said.

The ride up 495 to Boston this morning was exactly as it was thirty one years ago, with a clear blue poster board sky and crisp yellow leaves pasted against it, the autumn colors eventually blending together and whizzing by the driver side window as the car picked up speed. That day, I remember looking behind me often, at my off-white chiffon and lace gown zipped up tight in a garment bag hanging from the hook, feeling excited by the evening event to come. This morning, I looked into the rear-view mirror from the driver’s seat at the disheveled state of the back, an empty coffee cup, some sweatshirts, the dog’s coverlet left halfway tied to the headrest and hanging askew.

Janyce and I got married in October, too, in the public garden under a Ginkgo tree that failed to turn yellow, and instead remained green and vibrant as if it were an August day. The change of season was noted only by the flowers in all the beds having been pulled out of the ground that very morning by the groundskeepers, and the sun blanketed in grey clouds. Jim stood out there somewhere in the crowd of friends and family who made a circle around us for the ceremony, our two teenage sons together in their tuxedos beside me and Janyce at the base of the tree. I had a similar circle of standing guests the first time around, too, come to think of it— all those shadowy faces looking up at us from the bottom of a formal staircase in the glow of candlelight.

Moon, Venus and Maxfield Parrish sky | photo credit: Jim Spilman

I talked to a colleague on the phone the other day who is grieving an unimaginable loss. “It comes in waves,” he said. “Some days are better than others.” I’ve often heard people use this metaphor. Maybe it’s exactly like that, and with new grief especially. A daily, undulating, undercurrent that starts to build at certain intervals and rises up to a crest only to break into a crash, over and over. Maybe it’s like that. But I’ve always experienced a wistful sadness wash over me, at the very moment I’ve associated it with something else— the Paul Brady song playing from the restaurant speaker at the very same time you spot the sun lighting up the yellow leaves on the tree across the street, or the photo your ex-husband sends to you in a text that exactly matches the Maxfield Parrish print you hung on the wall of your first house, or all the other women leaving the waiting room one-by-one while you are the last one sitting there, suddenly realizing that it’s been hours, and why are you still going back in with yet another doctor for your fourth scan of the day?

In ancient Celtic tradition, the end of October is a liminal time when the boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead can be more easily crossed. Maybe this is why I’m drawn to October for all my major rites of passage.

Three years ago, I was the last woman sitting in a small waiting room just like this one. “Ms Guay?” said a woman in a white coat holding a clipboard. “Will you come with me?”

---

“I just realized that today is October 16?” I say to Janyce. This is the three-year anniversary of my surgery.

“Seriously?” she says.

“And this October we’re going to have a blue moon,” I say.

She’s standing in the doorway to my office at the end of the workday and it’s dark in the room, the light now gradually dimming away earlier every hour, and with every passing day. The room is lit only from the glow of my computer screen. I have a medical journal article pulled up and I read out loud to her the statistical relevance of micro calcifications found on a mammogram three years post treatment. For a small, easily treatable breast cancer. The most common kind.

“Don’t worry, okay?” she says. “And what does that mean about the moon?”

I switch computer tabs and read to her the article I read earlier in the day.

“On average, this cosmically coincidental event happens roughly every 2.7 years, so it's not exactly what I'd call "common," but it's certainly not so rare that you won't experience several of them during your lifetime.”

“Once in a blue moon, right?” I say.

“Right,” says Janyce.