Again I came out of it, or so I believe, as the private life changed for the better. When Jane and I married and moved to New Hampshire I did my best work over a period of three or four years of gradually diminishing excitement. Sometimes in these years I panicked over money; would I be able to pay next year’s tuition, or mortgage? Always something lucky turned up, like the Ox-Cart Man children’s book, and panic faded while work-pleasure returned. Then my mood turned again: I wrote for five years—steadily, all day, freelancing in New Hampshire—without the conviction or the sensation that my work was redeemable. I plugged along, working on certain longer poems for years, and the poems finally labored into what I wanted.
The worst day is the day when grief or sorrow overcome you. Your wife has cancer; you have cancer. Perhaps she will survive this engagement, perhaps you will, but the prospect of permanent estrangement darkens the day with curtains that let no light in. People happy in their work suffer like anyone else. Eight years ago Jane had cancer of the salivary gland—removed, and all clear by now; two and a half years ago I lost half my colon to a carcinoma. When I learned of my illness, I wept for myself and for my old mother, for my children and grandchildren, and for Jane. And I wept to think that I would have to stop working. This mortal curtailment of work-pleasure weighed less than the personal griefs—but it also weighed. When I went into the hospital I brought work with me, and in the last two days before I went home I started writing again. When I began to recover, still anxious about recurrence, I worked with a manic prolixity—not well—and knew in my heart that I worked against death. What’s more, I realized that I had always worked—the real thing, the absorbedness—in defiance of death.
TWO
THESE LAST WORDS I wrote more than a week ago, and I wrote them on a Friday without consciousness of anxiety. Saturday I drove to Vermont and back, talking to teachers about children’s books; it was a tense day because I drove through snow, rain, hail, ice, and more snow—on April 11. When I struggled home the mail had arrived with a happy message: The Guggenheim Foundation confirmed that Jane received a fellowship for her poems—great help at a time when the economy (even a free-lancer’s) was failing; and more importantly a public acknowledgment of Jane’s work. We celebrated quietly—but not for long. Sunday morning I worked on poems and on two small essays. Monday morning Jane and I left the house early for her appointment with Dr. Sutton, by coincidence the man who removed my colon cancer two and a half years ago. Jane has had a worsening pain in her tailbone, and one doctor suspected a cyst, which magnified in our imaginations. Dr. Sutton discovered no cyst or growth, but a genetic abnormality that left the tailbone liable to injury or soreness. We drove home with lessened anxiety to find a message on the machine; I should call my internist Dr. Clark. He had bad news: In my latest blood work-up, everything looked fine except the CEA, a blood protein which marks carcinoma. Before my colon surgery the CEA count had been a seven—anything over three is worrisome—and since my surgery it had been less than two. Today it was thirty-seven.