whistling past the graveyard
Ted Kooser
I live in the aftermath of cancer, the green reforestation period after the great fire, the brown high-water line drying to dust on the siding after the hundred-year flood, one lane now opened on the mountainside highway, a sheer drop to the sea on one side, cluttered by tons of broken concrete, a few chunks with sections of bright yellow centerline leading out into the blue.
I’m not alone. My wife is at the wheel of our life together, wind in her full, lovely gray hair. I’m on the passenger side, giving myself my mid-day tube feeding, trying not to spill into my lap. I live on cartons of a prescription formula for diabetics, with ample washes of water. Medicare picks up the tab for my feedings. We’re on our way into the rest of our lives.
I don’t think I’ve ever before used the word aftermath in something I’ve written. Something awful that has happened to one little old man, however seismic he may have felt it to be, scarcely merits the use of the word. But the etymology tells me that “math” comes from Old English and describes a meadow that has been mowed. So an aftermath is what’s left after some kind of crop has been harvested, and I am what’s left, a meadow now dusty stubble. The crop was malignant, like the black mold that ruins a whole stand of corn. Once smut’s in the soil it can keep coming back, and I’ve had three oral cancers over twenty-five years, most recently nine hours of surgery during which the right half of my jaw was removed and replaced with a section of bone from my left fibula— one of the two bones below the knee, not the shinbone but the
one behind it—not necessary for walking or bearing weight. I can both walk and bear weight and only yesterday I wrestled a fortypound bag of sunflower seeds into a garbage can with a tight lid that keeps the raccoons from eating the food for the finches, the grosbeaks and cardinals, bright creatures of my reforestation.
My new jaw was at first held in alignment by a titanium plate that had been computer-designed to match the profile of the original. The plate was left screwed in place for about a year until the bone had healed into position, then it was removed because of a persistent infection it had been sheltering. Whistling past the graveyard, I asked my surgeon if the screws were Phillips head or slotted. He said that the screws, terribly expensive, come from their makers with their own bespoke screwdrivers.
My healed face is now as symmetrical as it ever was, my nose a little crooked from a drunken fall in my thirties, my eyes positioned on either side of my nose as they should be, framed in trifocals, my ears where they’ve always been, fitted with hearing aids. My face is partly numb on the right side and around to my chin, which feels as if it might be carved out of wood, like the hinged chins of Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd.
The floor of my mouth is a drink-coaster-sized patch of skin carefully lifted away during the leg surgery, then fitted into the floor of my mouth, and since I’m an old man with bald legs I don’t have any hair growing there. Some patients do. One of the many small blessings for which I am thankful.
My tongue is limited in motion, right and left, in and out, and my swallowing apparatus has stiffened from the radiation I had twenty-five years ago. With three-quarters of my teeth still in place, I should be able to eat normal meals, but my swallowing problems prohibit that. Thus the tube in my belly.
That’s not as bad as it sounds. For one thing, it’s efficient, no chewing and chewing and chewing. No dirty dishes from my side
of the table. I don’t really long for those roast pork, sauerkraut and dumpling dinners I once so loved, but I can savor them in memory. I have all of those tastes in my head. No need for Alka Seltzer. I’m not in any pain as a person might think of pain, just a persistent dull ache on that side of my jaw. I have thick, syrupy saliva and sometimes I’ll blow a bubble when I open my mouth to speak, which would have been great fun in fourth or fifth grade.
I nearly always surprise myself with the sound of my voice, which is unpredictable, ranging from near normal to the squeakiness of Saturday-morning kids’ TV cartoons.
Between the original tongue-and-neck surgery and radiation in 1998—which gave me more than twenty very good years as husband, father, grandfather, uncle, friend, poet and professor— and my jaw replacement in 2022, I had a small cancer removed from the right side of my lower lip that left an almond-sized gap that embarrasses me, as I’m likely to drool and I can’t tell when I’m doing it. So I periodically dab at my mouth with a bandana I keep balled in my fist. The more I speak, the more drooling, so I’m better off keeping my mouth shut. My wife and my friends have already heard all my good stories anyway, sometimes over and over again. I limit my everyday conversations since I have difficulty making myself clear. I carry a card with my name on it so I don’t have to try to spell it out for the clerk who wants it to record my awards points. I never answer the phone, so don’t call. I’m best with email.
I’ve had a course of speech therapy sessions, which were helpful, but no longer would I dare rise to the challenge of reading in public. Getting through just one poem aloud can get messy. I could get through a short poem like “The Red Wheelbarrow” and you’d be able to understand me, but any poem longer than that is beyond my capabilities. I’m shy and I never much liked getting up in front of audiences anyway. I spent a lot of time as U. S. poet
laureate being scared of my audiences, but I’m done with that, and now I’m afraid of a tumor recurrence instead.
I’ve been very lucky to have had one very fine doctor overseeing me since my first run-in with cancer, a specialist in head and neck oncology and an excellent surgeon, teacher and mentor of residents. He was in his mid-thirties when we first met and he’s now in his early sixties. At our first meeting, now twenty-six years ago, as he prepared me for the possibility of having a sizeable piece taken out of my tongue, he asked if I did any public speaking, and I said none that I couldn’t do without, and my wife said, “Well, he IS a poet and sometimes does poetry readings.” By our next appointment he had gone to the library and checked out some of my books. That’s the kind of physician and person he is.
Every few weeks I have a session with a psychologist who helps me with bouts of anxiety. “Are those thoughts that you’re having in the wee hours being helpful?” Well, no, they’re not helpful at all. I’ve taught myself that if I wake and begin brooding obsessively about illness and death it’s time to get up and do something, to sit under a lamp with my notebook and write down whatever I’m given. While I’m writing I lift away from my body, have no discomforts, no ominous little pinches of pain. I pass into my words.
I’ve moved myself into the words you’ve been reading, though writing about cancer frightens me, as if by doing it I might inadvertently tilt something out of balance, and the experience of writing the few paragraphs you see here has stirred up some worry. Yet while I’m writing I’m almost always invincible, indelible. I’m not going to die today, or tomorrow, and I’ll probably live through this week and the next week, and I might not die this month, or six months from now.
So what can I do with today? A road crew has shown up to repair the mountain highway, and down on the flood plain a woman
TED KOOSER
in galoshes is standing out in her puddled front yard scraping mud from her coffee pot. All around the black, still smoldering mountain, little green pine trees are beginning to show.