It's Always Something (28 page)

While I was in the hospital, I put on my robe with the World War II wings that Harold Benjamin had given me. The wings reminded me that I just happen to live in a war-torn country, which is my own body. I’ve had to suffer a lot of things that most people don’t have to suffer. My reward is my life and the value I now put on it. A lot of people who go through cancer and come out of it say that afterward they get up happy every morning and appreciate life. They smell the roses and notice everything. Even after all I’ve been through, I still have days when I don’t notice anything. I can still drive to the drugstore and not notice the trees because I’m thinking about something else. I still get depressed and angry. I even had the nerve to say the other day that I don’t want to live anymore. Afterward I wondered how someone who’s fought so hard to live could say that, but I was just blue that day, blue because it’s so hard.

Sometimes what I’ve been through will flash back on me and it horrifies me. I can’t believe it happened to me—not me, thinking, conscious, funny Gilda, the clown. How could these things have happened? I don’t have to dream or imagine it, I just have to recall that it actually happened.

Today I’m continuing a maintenance chemotherapy. I don’t want to place too much faith in Dr. Greenspan as I did in other doctors, but he’s done so much for me, and there’s something about this cantankerous, defiant man. He talks too fast, and when I complain he says to me, “Shut up, shut up.”

I just want to kiss him because he believes that I will get completely well, and I think sometimes that has even more to do with how much the chemo works than what a doctor chooses to give you. I know better now that fighting cancer is a continuing process, like controlling diabetes or any chronic disease. I have to continue to fight it. My eating habits, my lifestyle, my attitude, continuing to get treatment, building my immune system—I have to keep fighting and I can’t ever stop. I can’t ever let down and say, “I beat it, I licked it, I’m finished.”

But mostly, I can’t be afraid of cancer. What I’ve learned the hard way is that there’s always something you can do. It may not be an easy thing to do. In some cases death seems more desirable. But there is always something you can do.

I also had to realize that I couldn’t do everything I wanted to do. I couldn’t keep calling all the cancer patients I knew, and I couldn’t try to help heal all the women with ovarian cancer, and I couldn’t read every letter I received because it was ripping me apart. I couldn’t be Mother Teresa. I couldn’t cry all those tears for everybody else, I had to take care of myself. For a while I thought that if I helped the world then I could get well by magic, but I learned that it just doesn’t happen that way. I couldn’t follow the progress of everyone I knew who had cancer because I had to pour all my energy into taking care of myself. I had to stop comparing myself to other people and thinking that what might happen to them was going to happen to me. It is important to realize that you have to take care of yourself because you can’t take care of anybody else until you do.

Of course, my ordeal has been speckled with angels. I’ve been blessed with wonderful people. Gene didn’t give up. He believed in me and never treated me like my days were numbered. I’ve been blessed because of advances in medical science, and I’ve been blessed with nurses, like Jodi, who sat in coffee shops with me in California, and the Connecticut nurses who joined me at bingo. And my girlfriends Pam and Judy, and Grace, and the fact that I’ve been able to afford to get the treatment that I did get, not to mention the miraculous Sparkle, a five-pound Yorkshire terrier who mimics my every mood and is my constant companion. Joanna Bull and The Wellness Community gave me the tools to be a fighter, and I have no doubt that the more I took control, and the more I participated in my health care, the more my body responded and the better I felt.

I had wanted to wrap this book up in a neat little package about a girl who is a comedienne from Detroit, becomes famous in New York, with all the world coming her way, gets this horrible disease of cancer, is brave and fights it, learning all the skills she needs to get through it, and then, miraculously, things are neatly tied up and she gets well. I wanted to be able to write on the book jacket: “Her triumph over cancer” or “She wins the cancer war.” I wanted a perfect ending, so I sat down to write the book with the ending in place before there even
was
an ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end. Like my life, this book has ambiguity. Like my life, this book is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity, as Joanna said.

When I was little, Dibby’s cousin had a dog, just a mutt, and the dog was pregnant. I don’t know how long dogs are pregnant, but she was due to have her puppies in about a week. She was out in the yard one day and got in the way of the lawn mower, and her two hind legs got cut off. They rushed her to the vet and he said, “I can sew her up, or you can put her to sleep if you want, but the puppies are okay. She’ll be able to deliver the puppies.”

Dibby’s cousin said, “Keep her alive.”

So the vet sewed up her backside and over the next week the dog learned to walk. She didn’t spend any time worrying, she just learned to walk by taking two steps in the front and flipping up her backside, and then taking two steps and flipping up her backside again. She gave birth to six little puppies, all in perfect health. She nursed them and then weaned them. And when they learned to walk, they all walked like her.

Reflections and Update from Gilda’s Cancer Psychotherapist and Friend, Joanna Bull

Anyone who has read this book surely appreciates the gifts that Gilda Radner has given us. And those who have seen her comic genius on “Saturday Night Live” reruns (keep them coming!) laugh when they see her in action—no matter how many times they’ve seen her most popular skits, the characters she brought to life, the daring of those characters’ everyday ordinariness, the brilliance of what made her stand out among her peers. So many people have told me that part of what raised Gilda above the crowd was their perception that she was a person of great kindness, and that despite—or maybe because of—the collection of neuroses she so openly suffered from and so thoroughly enjoyed, she was one of us: a human being capable of laughing at herself, hoping for authenticity whatever the circumstances, consciously or not, no matter how much in the dark she may have been—as most of us are about life’s most challenging issues.

Gilda had great wisdom and a great heart. Her role in the creation of Gilda’s Club—bringing together the perfect set of circumstances, people, places and conditions—is beyond calculation. Gilda’s Club—which has grown into a network of meeting places across North America where people with cancer, and their families and friends, can join with others to build the kind of social and emotional support Gilda experienced at The Wellness Community in Los Angeles—grew out of her belief that no one should have to go through cancer alone and that there’s always something you can do. It’s wonderful to contemplate how things happen when the elements fit together seamlessly, leading straight to the genesis of something vital to all of us. Despite Gilda’s suffering, her life with cancer and her learning in many ways to live with that cancer were a seminal part of that configuration, and for this we must thank her from the bottom of our hearts, as surely do those thousands of members of Gilda’s Club who have “come home” to their own warm and welcoming clubhouse.
Thank you, Gilda! It was a privilege to know you.

There are a few basic insights that Gilda articulated so touchingly in her book, with wisdom that came from her direct experience of cancer, that mean a lot to me:

• Whatever your personal way of learning to live with cancer, surround yourself with love and support, wherever you can find it.

• Never forget that you are an expert in the matter of your own needs.

• There is no “right or wrong” as you put together your own ways of living with cancer.

• Make the best of the world you have now.

• Don’t look for perfect endings, but allow not knowing to lead you to a deeper appreciation of life, so that you get your joy back on the way to an outcome that remains to be revealed.

Gilda’s experience at The Wellness Community did more to define the trajectory of her personal growth, starting with a diagnosis that infused every particle of her being with terrible fear and dread, than did any individual counseling she may have received from me, her psychiatrist, her attentive physician, her unconditionally loving husband, or her friends. She found that being with others who were going through the same thing she was, and who understood what that experience meant, was fundamental to her learning to live with cancer. Sharing that knowledge and wisdom, and being supported in whatever way one may choose to “
live
with cancer, whatever the outcome,” which is the focus of Gilda’s Club, can be incomparably useful. It is my experience of Gilda’s Club members that when the aspiration to
live
with cancer is understood, it never fails to lighten the heart.

As a health care professional who counseled Gilda throughout many of her all too common difficulties, and as one who has spent countless hours with hundreds of other people in treatment, as well as members of their families and support networks, I have seen and heard a whole lot, and I want to share some of it with you here, in the hope that it will help you live with cancer, however you may be touched by it. Let’s start with a quick look at Gilda’s book.

Gilda tells us at the outset of her remarkable memoir that she is going to give us a “seriously funny” book. That, she has done. This is a very “serious” book, indeed. It is as honest a recounting of a cancer experience as can be found anywhere. We’re spared nothing, and anyone who says that cancer is a breeze must have been out on a very windy day, with nothing less than hurricane-force gusts. Gilda tells it like it was for her, and for her it wasn’t easy. Nor was it easy for her family and involved, worried friends. It almost never is.

This book is also seriously “funny.” Humor to Gilda was as natural as breathing. Yet understandably, her outlook on the absurdity of things had its ups and downs during her illness, her living with it and her dying. Still, throughout it all, she managed to see the ultimate absurdity of being born, rattling around for a while, then checking out, ready or not. Cancer is a more lethal foe, Gilda tells us, than even the interior decorator! And as for death itself, which she describes as a crazy kind of deal, she says: “What we put into every moment is all we have.” Gilda had a way of stripping things down to their fundamentals.

A major thread that runs through Gilda’s book is her will to fight, which to her was the will to live. As someone who worked with her on the nuances of living and dying, I tried to acquaint her with the downside of that warrior image as distinct from the will to live, which is a wonderful force that can take us very far in many difficult situations. The problem with seeing life primarily as a battlefield, and living with cancer as an ongoing war that must be won, is that we may die having sustained that fight to its own, and our own, exhaustion, and lose the fight for reasons that are sometimes beyond understanding. It’s sad to think of people who stake everything on winning and despite their best efforts are clearly dying, because they may then feel like losers, and no one wants to be identified with this derogatory term. I think it unkind for any of us to press a person living with cancer to maintain a warrior’s stance, to “never give up the fight!” no matter how exhausted from it he or she may be. Instead, there is another very real option for all of us: to see life as an improbable, miraculous occurrence, during which we may
live
with cancer, whatever the outcome.

But despite our discussions, Gilda above all else saw her illness as a battle, and it was one that was very much influenced by the imagery and beliefs of the time. I respected Gilda’s stance, even as I respect patients and family members today who choose to support one another in a “fight” all the way through diagnosis, treatment, everyday living, and even, if it happens in the context of illness, dying. Gilda’s book ends with her acceptance of what I had called, in working with her, “delicious ambiguity,” the freedom that comes with simply not knowing the outcome of every happening or happenstance.

As she tells the story, she was finally able to recapture her joy in living, which had been sorely tried by disappointing recurrences, and treatments that seemed to go on forever. As Gilda sought meaning in her suffering, she saw that her gift of humor was a gift to all of us, and that sharing the entire range of the cancer experience in company with others at The Wellness Community added a dimension of significance to her life that she had not imagined existed. “There should be a thousand of them,” Gilda had said of The Wellness Community, where she reclaimed her sense of self. The only ending to her story better than this vivid little pocket of wisdom would have been her survival.

It’s because of Gilda’s ability to embrace the uncertainty of life that she and her husband, Gene Wilder, and I talked about the possibility of starting a cancer support community in the Northeast, where the couple had a second home, in Connecticut. After her death, Gene, entertainment critic Joel Siegel, who himself died of cancer in 2007, and actor-singer Mandy Patinkin invited me to leave California to put into action in New York City the ideas I had been collecting for years for the development and implementation of an ideal community of this kind. I had been clinic director at the first of these noninstitutional gathering places, the pioneering Center for the Healing Arts in Los Angeles, where the basic pieces of the cancer support community had come together. I had next spent years working with Harold Benjamin at The Wellness Community, which followed and greatly improved on the Center. For me these early developments were part of a natural progression toward Gilda’s Club, now Gilda’s Club Worldwide. More than one of Gilda’s friends has said that in the end, Gilda’s Club may be Gilda’s greatest legacy of all. “I kept thinking,” Gilda writes, “there must be a purpose to this somewhere. There had to be. How could Gilda Radner, whose name was synonymous with comedy, now become synonymous with cancer? How am I going to make cancer funny? How am I going to get people to laugh about it?”