Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home: A Memoir

by Natalie Goldberg

There is so little time Only poems will last and the mountain ranges of Beethoven

So tell me something good before it’s too late

found a balance with Oh Fat Tuna Man — with the one thousand units I was taking each week. No fevers, no chills. Maybe this isn’t too bad. By the end of October I’ll be done. My blood work is excellent. “No cancer can live with numbers like these,” my oncologist repeated. My white cells are smack in the normal range for the first time in decades. Okay, Nat — a year off and then I’ll get back on the old horse and ride. I have been inconvenienced, but it is temporary.

I watched my mind grab for reason, for time. Time was my only treasure chest. How much? In my mind I cornered off the year. Made my problem digestible, acceptable. But I did notice, when friends visited, subtle differences. Yes, they had more energy, more mobility than I did. They were still busy in the world with the routines — the jobs, workouts, hikes, plans — they had before. No interruption. But there was something much more subtle, something I often didn’t catch until after they left: They don’t know they will die. It was constantly with me now, my mortality. It hung out on my right shoulder like an animal, patient yet hungry. It wanted me, and I knew that eventually it would have me. I asked myself in the face of it: How do I live? I recalled the Buddha’s last words: All things that are born must die. In any case continue with vigor. Meanwhile, cancer was proceeding for me.

Hugo wrote: I don’t want to admit / It’s cold alone in the ground….I’m sure he wants to be found. I say they put the dead / here where north and east gales can find them. But we can’t find him. We finally give up, and she takes me to the Milltown Union Bar — a place where he spent a lot of time. He wrote a poem there that begins, You were nothing / going in and now you kiss your hand. We sit at the long bar and order beer. It’s late afternoon. Peggy points out the elk head. She tells me that when her mother died, she drove her mother’s ashes in a box in the front seat of the car for four weeks to all the places her mother’d been and loved. She drove through Wyoming, Ghost Ranch, Taos — where her parents were married — Arizona, and finally up through western Colorado. She spread her mother’s ashes in the wilderness meadow on the Flat Tops where her dad’s ashes were spread twenty-five years earlier. She went home by way of Moab and the Canyonlands, her father’s favorite place on Earth. What a wonderful way to grieve, I thought. The day darkens. We didn’t find Hugo’s granite stone, his dates 1923–1982, and the words written there from one of his poems: Believe you and I sing tiny / and wise and could if we had to / eat stone and go on. But he’s still here with us now, all over Missoula, not contained anywhere. I found him in our talk and drink and walking the rows and driving the roads with big sky over us and the Clark Fork River running through. If I stay alive long enough,...

“I have it. I have to find a surgeon. They’re giving me info. I’ll call you back later.” And she hung up. I placed the receiver in the stand. “Bill, she has it.” I’d been dumped into freezing water. I couldn’t move. My body was gooseflesh. I couldn’t absorb, take in this information. How can this be? Bill took us both out that night to the fanciest French restaurant in Santa Fe. He insisted on treating, though I knew his money was tight. I understood this was a sweet gesture in his need to do something, but I hated the restaurant. Every mouthful was rancid, sour, unappealing. Bill, who is a food critic, thought it was good. So did Yu-kwan, who ordered escargots and calf’s liver in onions. Nothing stopped that girl from eating. She also had a big dessert. I thought they had no taste, that they’d gone crazy to like the food. I was sick with worry, stunned in horror. Yu-kwan was going to get a mastectomy and lose a breast?

“Nat, she’s a cat,” Erica said as we huffed up a challenging mountain. “The rest of us are dogs, eager to be petted, acknowledged.” Erica made short panting sounds. “Love me, love me.” She hung her tongue out. “Yes, yes, that’s it,” I laughed. On a bench outside, a few months later, Yu-kwan began for no reason: “This is how cats lick themselves,” and she extended her lower arm across her tongue and then the other arm. She turned her head to the left and raised her upper left arm, nuzzled and licked under her armpit. “This is how they get clean.” My eyes twirled in my head. She looked exactly like a feline. “Did you ever have a cat?” I asked. “No, never.” “Then how do you know?” “I just know.” That night, when I couldn’t sleep, I listened to her breath, heavy, then slightly snoring, then snoring deeply, then silent, never using a pillow. In a pale yellow nightgown, she was out in space, against aging and time, arms outstretched over the whole dark world. Later, feeling the fragrant heat of her breath, I shook her awake. “Sing to me,” I said, and she obliged, still hovering someplace else. Out came a sweet rendition of the Beatles’s “When I’m Sixty-Four.” At that time we were both in our sixties, out beyond our generation’s imagining, out in the footprints of the comets.

WATCHED YU-KWAN not resist being tired. Instead she accepted it and lay down on the bed or long couch in the back room, staring out the window at the aspens. Our acupuncturist encouraged us to buy a lamb shank and drink the broth. “It’s so good to build strength,” she said. I did it once or twice, didn’t like the taste, was bothered by the smell in the kitchen. Yu-kwan persisted, bringing home that raw shank every other day, plopping it in the pot and waiting while it boiled. She poured a cup for herself and one for me. “C’mon, I insist you drink it.” “Why don’t you drink mine too?” I sipped at it, making the ordeal longer than necessary. She watched me quietly, a resignation in the way she leaned over the sink holding herself up. “Do what’s right. We have to do what is good for

She bought a wig but never wore it. One night I asked her to put it on for a few moments. “I want to try to remember what you used to look like.” She obliged. A black coif appeared on her head. She pranced around the bedroom. “Here I am.” She flung open her arms — and then flung off the wig. “And here I really am.”