Jenn Hall

Illness flicks on a bare overhead bulb, illuminating a world previously dark. There is death, peering from behind a cracked door across the hall of a suburban New Jersey hospital with a smirk. Was he watching me the whole time? There is the world, in motion outside the window as fall drags its browning leaves from swaying trees. Has time always bent like this?

These days around surgery are hazy. Rest is not a choice.

Rest is a force that carries its own gravity.

**

The day after my abdomen is cut open to save my life, morphine sleep comes for me in intermittent waves. The drug blurs the boundaries between my waking and dream worlds. It has its own will. I lay in my hospital bed with the alarm on and talk with my mom and dad and husband after an emergency after-hours colectomy that pushed beyond midnight.

Then, without realizing it, I dip out. I fade into a land of strange dreams and twisting shadows. When I awaken, sometimes, I resume a conversation that ended hours before, not aware that I had fallen into the elsewhere.

**

How do we carve memories during times like these?

When I think of that October night, I think of the attending surgeon who arrived and changed everything after days of (painful) observation. It was like the adult had entered the room, eying my parched skin and IVs with necessary impatience. Everything swerved: “You’re almost definitely having surgery,” he said. “Tomorrow at the latest, pending tests.”

The time for MiraLAX and prayer had ended.

When I think of that night, I think of the tall man with the gentle voice who wheeled me towards the surgical theater in the lower, older part of the hospital. There was a full Hunter’s moon in the sky, and Venus shone brightly through the windows near the elevator. It felt like magic, like some form of gentle reassurance.

“You have a calm vibe,” I said to the man. “Perfect for a moment like this.” I felt oddly unworried as everyone around me fell apart.

“I’ve been working on my energy,” he said, edging me around corners.

“Me too,” I whispered.

Later, I told the on-call surgeon that he should start a meditation podcast, blessed as he was with a beautiful voice. I told him he’d have fans all over the world. People must say such strange things peering up from their stretchers into the unknown.

**

I have long resisted rest. I am not a napper, unless I am falling ill. My husband, on the other hand, can fade towards his dreamscape in mere moments. How does he do it? By contrast, I am built of anxious energy—I am an eldest daughter, I am a woman, I am a wife. I have survived traumas and watch each moment in the manner of a hawk. I carry lists in my head, and there is always something else to do.

Yet in the uncanny valley into which I was sent after my surgery revealed colon cancer, naps come for me in the late afternoon and feel delicious. I lean against my teal heating pad on the couch and watch my cat’s chest rise and fall with breath. (Who sleeps better than an elderly cat?) I let loose thoughts drift towards an inner horizon, wrapped in an oversized hoodie and soft pants.

These naps feel restorative. No, they feel necessary.

These naps feel like they’re alive.

So, I gather stillness in these odd weeks between surgery and its looming aftermath. Day by day, I learn about the power of retreat. My lists fall to the ground, scattered leaves. Animal hair collects in darkened corners, and I don’t care. The tub needs scrubbing, mold creeping as it does, and I merely look at it. When I do client work, it doesn’t feel urgent.

Life has changed, all at once. It has become an inversion.

Four years ago, I was a caregiver as my mother battled breast cancer, all frantic energy and wide-open eyes and movement. Now, I lay back and stare into the middle distance, while my mom searches for recipes online and watches over me from our red Ikea chair.

**

Still, the questions come for me in the middle of the night, sharp and concise. The clock runs its course from three to four, and I think: What if? Why? Waning moonlight draws devilish patterns on the carpet as these thoughts swirl, and I submit. I go downstairs and turn on the light.

**

There are days when I feel called to write—to stretch towards glimmering aspects of who I was before. There are days when I push myself to walk a mile. Some days, though, it is enough to stare out the window and watch the late-autumn light change.

I did not know about this form of enchantment before. I did not know that there are lessons to be learned in doing so little.

Soon, it will be December, and I will face my next series of challenges. I will sit in a chemo chair with a thin, white hospital blanket wrapped around me. I will try to still my quaking mind and let chemicals that are poisons work to mitigate the darkest side of my diagnosis.

If I’m lucky, maybe, I’ll sleep through some of it. I’ll wrap my fear in rest and let my eyes fall closed, the soft sensation of fingertips pulling me back towards the liminal, where nothing can quite reach me, yet nothing is far enough away. I will float, then, in a semi-sleep where overlapping voices speak hope into the ether, the heartbeats of the cancer patients all around me merging into a wall of quiet sound.

—

Jenn Hall lives and writes in Jersey. Her essays have been published in Brevity Blog, Peregrine Journal, HAD, Entropy, Pidgeonholes, The Maine Review, Hippocampus Magazine, and Paste, and she was a Best American Food Writing notable. An MFA student at Bay Path University in pursuit of a certificate in Narrative Medicine, she is an assistant flash editor for Hippocampus Magazine. Though driven to meander, she has learned that the best stories are hidden in plain sight.