On
September 12, 2001, Micah and I stayed in a suite in the Venetian hotel in Las
Vegas. It was huge, palatial. It had a marble bathroom bigger than my apartment
at the time, with marble lions and gold-plated faucets pouring into the jacuzzi
tub. The lobby, which bled seamlessly into a mall of high-end shops, had an
eerily lit, faux-blue sky.
Neither
of us has ever stayed at the Venetian—or any other mega-resort there—either before or since. For us, nothing ever had to “stay” in Vegas, because we simply
never went there. No bachelor parties or girls weekends. No spur-of-the-moment,
“Vegas, baby, Vegas!” road trips. Not even a Celine
Dion concert or visit to the Guggenheim or ironic jaunt to the idyll of
postmodern architecture.
We were
there because a day earlier we had been in Sun Valley, Idaho, happily ensconced
in my family’s time-share condo, hiking and
reading and watching deer walk by on the path above the river from where we
were reading Levinas on the living room couch, when we got the call from my
mother to turn on the television. Actually, to be accurate, when we got the
call, we were asleep. We turned on the news after the planes hit but before the
towers fell. After approximately twenty-four hours of watching, when airports
were at a standstill and no plane was flying anywhere in North America, we
decided to drive home to Los Angeles. We were numb anyway, we might as well be
staring into the blankness of the Nevada desert. There were stretches there
that we couldn't even get the radio. When we drove until we couldn’t drive any more that day, the place we were in was Las
Vegas.
Driving
in, after the shock and horror followed by sensory deprivation of the previous
day and a half, we expected it to be a ghost town, empty. Or else perhaps that
the whole city was grouped around various jumbotrons down the strip, watching
and waiting, crying and praying. But that is not what it was like. People were
gambling. They were taking pictures of themselves in groups in front of
casinos. They were eating themselves silly. They were shopping—and this was way before they were told it was patriotic to
do so. In fact, the whole scene was crazy, and surreal, and unbelievably
garish, and we felt like we were the only two people in the apocalypse movie who
actually know that the apocalypse has come—but looking back, it was also
the moment of calm before the storm—the tsunami—of nationalism and rhetoric and jingoism and fear-mongering
and legitimate grieving and all of what came after. It was so bizarre, so
wildly out of tune with the horror that had just transpired, that we walked
right into the middle of it and got ourselves a room, not at the Nellis Air
Force Base Best Western, but at the Venetian. For when the whole world has been
turned upside down, the mental asylum may just seem like the sanest place.
One of
the feelings I remember most distinctly about that moment in time was the
ominous sense of “what's next?” They say this is an element of trauma: to have had the
momentous violence just have happened, but to feel as if the worst is yet to
come. Which American city was going to be bombed next? Which, of course, makes
our departure from our remote mountain retreat all the more irrational. But the
vacation was over; we couldn't just stay out there in the evergreens and the
lupine meadows; whatever happened, we needed to be back with friends and family
and quite frankly, media connection. Which is why the best use we got out of
that suite at the Venetian was the capability on the big-screen TV to watch
several cable-news stations at once.
This
year, on September 12, it will be one day after my last chemo session. Please
forgive me this heavy-handed and incommensurate analogy. I am not suggesting
that any one person’s illness is comparable to the
events of 9/11. But the coincidence of the date makes me think about that same
feeling of how reality has shifted in some fundamental way. Many, many cancer
survivors experience the end of treatment with dread; everyone expects them to
be relieved, but it is not that simple. It's like the damage has been done but
now you have to deal with the aftermath. I am reminded of that same
apprehension that even though the terrible has already happened, you’re waiting for the next shoe to drop. It may just get
worse. That’s not necessarily a factual
appraisal, but it’s a powerful emotional
dimension. How is one to trust the body that’s already deceived you once?
And I know this is anticipatory, but perhaps it will be like in Vegas where you
just want to yell and scream to all the indifferent, seemingly anesthetized
crowds around you, “What's wrong with you? Don't
you realize what's just happened?”
Of
course, finishing chemo is cause for celebration, and believe me, I'm ready to
throw a party. I’m tempted to plagiarize the
name for it from a friend who called hers the “It seems like a dream-o, but
I'm all done with chemo” bash. I may not be in a faux
gondola in the middle of the Nevada desert on September 12, but I do think it
will be surreal nonetheless. There's so much yet to determine about how to
establish the “new normal” on the other side. How will priorities be reprioritized?
How will the passage of time be marked in new ways? How will the rebuilding
begin?
I am
grateful that this date falls before Rosh Hashanah. Eleven years ago, once we had returned from
our stayover in Vegas, Micah and I hosted high holiday services at our house.
It was a moment when our 20-something friends wanted not to be at their parents’ shul, a moment when we wanted intensely to be together in
a meaningful way, but we wanted it to be personal to us. We printed our own
siddurs; we cleared out the furniture from the living room; we borrowed a Sefer
Torah from Camp Ramah. Micah played many roles at once, but our several dozen
friends all variously participated as gabbai, as chazzan, having aliyot, reading texts.
People brought their own poems to read; the text discussions never seemed so
heartfelt; imagining death in the myriad ways of the Unetanetokef never so concrete; there were a lot of tears. Those
services bound us to the participants in new ways that none of us have ever
forgotten.
The days
of awe are this amazing amalgamation of sweetness and renewal with solemnity
and deep soul-searching as we consider our own mortality. When I found out I
had cancer, I had this sense of panic, of urgency, “Oh no! not yet! too soon!”—which is precisely the feeling
that the high holidays are trying to get you to feel—“do it now! make a change! don't put it off!”—without actually having the diagnosis. Or by carrying the
sense that it could befall any one of us at any time.
For me,
this time, it won’t be a mental exercise, an
imaginary scenario. I think the touchstone of the New Year will be the precise
counterbalance to the disorientation of September 12. A way to acknowledge,
with deep gratitude, a new start, another year of life, not in isolation in the
crowd, as in Vegas, but held aloft by loving community, woven together in all
our wounds, as we seek to move forward into a new phase, humbled, renewed,
recommitted to what’s essential.
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