Mind and body

Laurie
Mind and body
Starbucks, July 23, 2007

Deb Margolin said she was tired of mortality. “It doesn’t have poetry. It’s not like leaves turning colors. It’s about being sliced open and having parts cut out.” She’d had another surgery in June and learned she might have a deadly form of lymphoma, a bum roll of the dice without meaning but full of significance. She has lived with the diagnosis of Hodgkin’s as well as nonHodgkin’s lymphoma for fifteen years, and we have been friends all that time. She wasn’t going to submit to more chemo—other treatments but not that. “I want to die with a few hairs on my head, a spring in my step, and a curse on my lips. Let me at least go out like that if I have to go. But I want this life, this beautiful, awful life.”

I listened. That’s what people on the ropes want. That and not being compared to anyone else.

Richard and I read her new monologue, Oh Yes, I Will, inspired by the recent surgery, and I found it brilliant, funny, and drained of complaint—a fantasy about the twelve minutes she spent talking in the operating room under anesthesia. She imagined version after version of what she might have said, each one expanding our understanding of the plight of a woman in her fifties with two teen-aged children and a devoted husband, a woman in love with being embodied who might be dying. Richard observed a split in her between the mind and body: “She wants consciousness to have a means of existing independent of her physical form. She doesn't want to cease to be in the face of illness.”

It made him think about his own body chemistry—the high and low sugars, the hormone swings—and its effect on his mind. “More and more I feel there is only one me, and we are multiple.” He, too, has an incurable condition, although he isn’t ill. Do we think that people aren't themselves when they are reacting to drugs? Anesthesia?

Last night I read Spalding Gray's final, unfinished monologue, Life Interrupted, about the car crash in Ireland that wrecked him physically and from which he could not recover. His leg and hip damaged, he could no longer stride out on the long walks that ushered him into the world where things happened and stories were hatched. In the fragment, he is marveling at the bizarreness of the accident: the car he was riding in was hit by a van carrying a vet who had tended a sick calf, an animal only that day Spalding had remarked to the farmer needed to be treated or put out of its misery.

Spalding had become an artist of possibility, game for anyone's cockamamie notion, willing, one time, to go off to Williamsburg, Brooklyn to work as a janitor in an Orthodox synagogue—to see what would happen. Why couldn't he keep turning his life into an exhibit for contemplation? As a consequence of the accident, little pieces of his skull were embedded in his brain, and the damage could not be evaluated. He fell into a black depression, eventually ending his life by leaping from the Staten Island ferry.

Richard doesn’t know the sides of him that emerge during low sugars because the part of his mind that processes language and remembers events is oxygen deprived. He utters wordlike sounds, but they are gibberish. In a low sugar, he refuses to comply. Why does this side of him militate against his survival? He says he feels fine, although he isn’t okay. Does tension dissolve and euphoria set in as self-awareness becomes eclipsed? Does a person become like an animal, on the cusp of consciousness but not fully inhabiting it?

If you ask Deb what you can say or do to help her, she will answer: Read my work, come to my shows.