Infirmary

She was smiling. The plump, kind, middle-aged, black woman with jet black hair was sitting at the foot of my bed and smiling a warm, chocolate smile at me as she gently squeezed my calf. I took a deep breath and let it out slow. Everything…. was going….. to be….. alright.

Sometimes fear would grip me and it became hard to breath, hard to see a future, hard not to slip into an all consuming despair.  

I was in the beginning of my aggressive chemotherapy treatments for a rare and advanced form of cancer.  My oldest child was six and my youngest, three.  My marriage was rocky and we had just moved to a new town for a new beginning.  We were far from family, with no local friends and had lived here only a few months when I got the diagnosis no one wants to hear.  Stage four granulosa cell cancer scattered in my abdomen. If I hadn’t known what that meant already, the tears running down my doctor’s face conveyed the truth clearly enough.  There were only a few other known cases so they were careful not to give me too much information with such a small sample.  The information they did have wasn’t real good. I remember a mention of 5 years.  My youngest, Grace, would be eight in five years.  I didn’t want to leave a second grader motherless.  I didn’t want to die.

We were renting a large house that had originally been the old Union Pacific railroad men’s club house.  There was a giant main room with a huge fireplace for the men to gather, eat and play cards in. The bathrooms had old wooden stalls and the long hallway had numbered wooden lockers. The kitchen was designed cafeteria style with a long, fold down counter to walk by and pick up your plate of hot food after a long shift.  There was a room that was probably used for storage that served us as the kids’ bedroom.  We had partitioned off a portion of the large gathering room with bookshelves for our bedroom but now I needed a dark and quiet room away from the hubbub of family life to recover from surgery and treatment.  In the back, with its own tiny bathroom, was a small narrow room that we used as a walk in closet. With the addition of a twin bed and lamp, it became a sick room for me. We learned later that this room was used as an infirmary for the railroad men.  It was an odd house but it served us well.  The kids have fond memories of all that rambling space, long corridors and generous wrap around porch.  Collectors would come to the door and ask to look in the attic for antique railroad gear.  We never ventured into the full sized upper story which was accessible only by ladder and avoided the dark scary basement as well.

I spent a lot of time in that railroad infirmary alone. Treatments began in April and concluded in September. I used books to distract myself from my pain, prayer to fortify my soul, music to soothe the fear but I would eventually always give in to the tears and the self pity and wretchedness that is worse than the sickness itself or even the poison they use to cure it. Finally, I used the drugs they gave me to numb body and mind and sleep.

I wasn’t alarmed the first time I saw her sitting at the foot of my bed.  I was glad not to be alone with my thoughts, it was so comforting to have her there.  We never spoke.  I saw her only a couple of times but there were many times I knew she was there.  I could feel her comfortable weight at the end of my bed and knew she was looking over me, looking out for me, even protecting me.  She gave me the feeling of being a watched over child with no adult responsibilities and I would remember that none of it was in my hands anyway, why was I fretting?  I guess that is what peace feels like.   Like surrender.  Peace isn’t something you grit your teeth to feel, it is like when anything but being at perfect peace just seems silly.  Eventually, I realized that it made no sense that a black woman would periodically walk into my room and that she couldn’t really be physically there but by then it didn’t matter.  My worldview allows for the Divine, angels and demons all outside of our physical reality.  I’m not sure who or what she was.  A shadow of a comforter from another time? A ghost? She wasn’t what I had pictured God or an angel to look like but none of that seemed to matter either.

I didn’t tell anyone about her until long after my chemo was over.  I didn’t want anyone to dismiss it as the drugs or wishful thinking or to diminish my experience of her.  Then one day I told my sister over the phone and tried to make it casual and easy to backpedal out of in case she thought I was crazy.  

She didn’t think I was crazy.  

That was fifteen years ago and although I’ve had a few more rounds with cancer since, I’ve never seen her again.  The memory of my black angel fades with each passing year but sometimes, late at night, I feel a weight at the end of my bed but when I look down, it’s only the cat.