The clarity of cancer.
Skylar reflects on his recent diagnosis and leaving a legacy behind.
Hey y’all,
A month ago to the day – February 26 – my life changed. After three months of feeling fatigued and having a sore throat, I went to the emergency room at the behest of my friend Cha.
My own primary care physician (that’s GP for my British readers) hadn’t found anything when I went for a regular physical in November. The urgent care doctor didn’t find anything, either. A dentist removed an infected tooth, but that did no good.
Thank God, then, for the emergency room. Following a CT scan and several hours stuck in a crowded hallway, a nurse practitioner named after a state who seemed more like he belonged in Joshua Tree than Johnson City told me I had a “mass” on my right throat. “Likely metastatic,” he said, as he explained to me in no uncertain terms he thought I had cancer.
My desert shaman doctor was right. I have cancer. Specifically, stage two tonsil cancer.
For me, and I assume it is this way for most folks, the “c” word led to another “c” word: clarity. Cancer clarifies what matters in ways nothing I’ve ever experienced has. Birdsong is clearer, blue skies are brighter, sunshine is warmer, and friendship is sweeter.
Cliché, but true. Because, you see, at the heart of this cancer diagnosis is the clarity that comes with being presented with the one immutable fact of life: It ends. Tomorrow is promised to no one. I always knew that, but now – when doctors are talking about five-year life expectancies and treatment success rates and how I have a better chance because I’m relatively young even though being relatively young means getting throat cancer is unusual – I know that. In my bones. In ways I never knew it before.
If I die tomorrow, what have I left? A series of opinion pieces and newsletters. My legacy is calling Donald Trump the “tangerine tyrant” and once writing an “ode to kudzu.” Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud of what I have accomplished. But this isn’t what I want my legacy to be. I want more.
This is partly selfish. The thought of dying doesn’t bother me. The thought of being dead, even less. My departed friend Jay, who himself died tragically young from cancer, once said to me “I didn’t mind not existing for billions of years before I was born so I doubt I’ll mind not existing when I die.”
Jay was an atheist, explaining how death didn’t scare him as a non-believer. I happen to instinctually believe in a higher power and an afterlife, though I can’t prove it and have no conception of what it might be like. But like Jay, I am very circumspect about death. It is a natural part of life. I’m not wanting to do it anytime soon, but there’s no since denying it’s going to happen. It’s life’s one guarantee.
What frightens me is being forgotten. Of dying with nothing to show for having lived. Of not leaving behind a legacy for future humans to build upon.
Legacy. That word, like clarity, has been on my mind a lot lately. How do I want to be remembered when I leave here? No, that’s not it.
Legacy. It isn’t how I’m remembered. As George Washington sings in Hamilton, “you have no control who lives, who dies, who tells your story.” That simple truth is part of why the “wrong side of history” argument bothers me. We simply have no idea how history will remember us. Even the Confederates thought they were the good guys.
No, legacy is not how I’m remembered. Legacy is what I leave behind. It’s the body of writing I have done and will continue to do. It is the kindness I’ve shown others. It is the contribution I make to recording this moment in history, from one unique perspective in one unique corner of our world. Of our country. Of our times.
The people on my living room wall have left quite the legacy. Frederick Douglass was a leading abolitionist and one of the most important thinkers of 19th century America. Eleanor Roosevelt helped found the United Nations and author the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Nina Simone is a goddess. They left legacies to be proud of.
Have I? Hardly. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, to be sure. But proud? Not yet.
“Why do you write like you’re running out of time?” Alexander Hamilton is asked. I reckon Hamilton wrote like he’s running out of time because he knew he was running out of time. We all are. Every morning I cross out the previous day on my desk calendar, and every morning I am reminded I am one step closer to the grave.
I can let the thought of my mortality twist me up like a pretzel, or I can let it spurn me on. So that’s what I’m doing.
Clarity is knowing that I have a limited amount of time – even if that’s fifty years – to leave a mark, to build a fortune so one day my husband and children don’t have to struggle the way I have struggled. To have fun family heirlooms to pass on to the nieces and nephews. To have something that actually deserves the name “literary estate.”
That begins with being courageous. So. I am rebooting this newsletter as my personal newsletter. I will write about things from my life. I will write about public policy. I will write about whatever I want. And I won’t be scared.
You see, I’ve spent a lot of my life being scared – scared of being judged, scared of being rejected by both the Appalachian world that rejected me for being gay and the mainstream media who has rejected me for being Appalachian.
I ain’t got time to be scared anymore, not of rejection. Not of failure. Not of saying the wrong thing or doing the wrong thing or pissing off the wrong person or any of it. I can’t be scared of the world when right now nothing scares me more than my own body which is actively trying to kill me in ways strangers on the Internet and publishers simply aren’t.
If my writing isn’t perfect, who cares? At least it will be real.
So that’s what I’m doing. I’m just going to write. I don’t know what about. But it’s all I’ve ever done. I’m going to write, and I’m going to be brave. Because that’s what I do. I write and be brave.
Until next time, y’all be blessed.
x. Skylar