Cancer, Year 6, has been a tough year. Cut loose from the chemo treatments that not only prolonged my life but also structured it, I felt unmoored. I joined a support group for the first time and started this blog to share the bumpy road trip that is my life. On New Year’s Day, I built a shrine on the fireplace mantel by walking around the house and gathering any object that seemed imbued with a spiritual aura. This was a radical departure from my devout atheism, but household shrines are fairly common across cultures, history, and beliefs. They preserve the memory of ancestors, offer a place for prayer and supplication, or keep the household gods appeased with snacks and incense.
My shrine includes: A Mayan human snake effigy pipe. In Mayan mythology, the serpent carries the sun and stars across the sky. At one point in my life this would have been my most treasured possession (for smoking weed). A small blue statue of Ganesh, the elephant-headed Hindu God, is missing one of his four arms, the one that would impart a blessing. Lord of Success and Remover of Obstacles, Ganesh should be prayed to before embarking on any trip to Houston.
For my birthday, Harry gave me a voodoo doll. Therapists use voodoo dolls in some surprising ways: For employees to skewer while imagining the doll is their boss; for couples to skewer imagining the doll is their spouse. This mock violence restores a sense of agency and justice. I imagine that the doll is the last nurse who tried to put an IV in my arm. He asked me my name and birth date, as usual, told me that his ex-wife’s name was also Elizabeth, and then bent the IV needle on a bone in my wrist. Periodically, I poke my voodoo doll in the hopes that he feels the sharp sting of regret.
Two objects from folklore include a little ceramic figure of a fairy that Harry gave me one Christmas. He said it reminded him of me; it doesn’t resemble me at all. One Christmas he gave me a dead fish preserved in aspic in a glass globe. It doesn’t resemble me either. There’s also a small brass dragon, not quite big enough to reduce the living room to ashes.
There is a replica of a pre-Columbian ocarina, a type of flute. A headless ceramic figure, you blow through a hole at her feet and there are two finger holes; the sound is quite pleasant. Like so many of the tchotchkes that clutter our shelves, Harry bought this one at auction decades ago. He can remember that in the same lot was a tiny iron pug, now on top of the antique dental cabinet by the window, along with 2 metal candlewick snippers, an old pair of binoculars, and a letter opener in the shape of a robin.
Finally, there’s a wood figure of a town crier that once belonged to Harry’s mother. Town criers are popular as historical re-enactors—you can even hire one in England through the Ancient & Honourable Guild of Town Criers. They were easily recognized by the repetition of “Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye” or “Oyez(x3).” Like Twitter, they kept a semi-literate public up to date on the latest gossip, delivered proclamations, spread the news, or sounded the alarm of, say, a coming plague. Like the crier, I sometimes ring a large brass bell, a “hear ye” to the universe so that it pays attention to my message: Namaste. The ringing of a bell three times is a common ritual to mark the end of chemo treatments.
Our home, with its clutter of nominally sacred objects, has perhaps suffocated our household gods. Or, perhaps, my reverence for these objects has become haphazard. They may soon be returned to their regular spots on various shelves, returned to the anonymity of dusty tchotchkes. To imbue objects however ordinary with some spiritual significance requires at least a nod to a higher power. I have nodded in the direction of belief before; I married a Catholic. While I didn’t convert, I did go through Pre-Cana, the Catholic version of “marriage prep.” I think it was important to my first husband’s father, who was quite devout, that we marry in a Catholic service. The priest came to our wedding from another reception and said, as we joined hands, “My beer friends, we are gathered together….” Obviously, the marriage didn’t last, but there is a higher god and it is beer.
When we first moved to the South, I joined a local church, in part because its liberal politics were inviting, and it was a source of community outside the University. The other parishioners were only somewhat welcoming. For one outing we were invited to meet at the church to carpool, but everyone got into cars with their own friends and we ended up driving to the baseball game alone. Yet the sermons were brilliant, delivered by a priest truly committed to inspiring social justice, and I loved the ritual of kneeling and standing, kneeling and standing. But the story of Jesus is not one I believe in, its repetition is not comforting to me, and my loyalty lies elsewhere. Just this past December we bought our first menorah. It was a temple menorah and not a Hanukkah menorah, so we celebrated Hanukkah for 7 days rather than 8. The warm glow of candles made up for what we lacked in ceremony.
If not belief than what? During my first round of chemo, I found resolve in Band of Brothers and The Pacific. These were stories of suffering and endurance that inspired me to keep going: You get up, slog through mud, face your fears, do it again the next day. I have watched Saving Private Ryan a dozen times: You get up, slog through mud, face your fears, do it again the next day, bitterly searching for “Matt Damon” who, once found, goes on to live to a ripe old age.
Tim O’Brien’s story, The Things They Carried, catalogs the artifacts carried into battle by soldiers in Vietnam. It’s a tribute to the power of necessary objects. The men carry what is required: Rifles, ammunition, tents and supplies. They carry what they need: One soldier carries extra morphine; another carries a New Testament. They carry memories and fantasies: The Lieutenant carries his girlfriend’s good luck pebble in his mouth, hoping that she’ll love him but knowing that she will not. Photographer Thom Atkinson in a photo series called “Soldiers’ Inventories” researched and photographed what soldiers have carried through the long history of war, starting with a military kit from the Battle of Hastings in 1066. What can be carried? A shield, a helmet, an axe. A hacking jacket; a tintype of your wife; needle and thread. All soldiers, over the course of a thousand years, carried a spoon.
What I carry: A token from the day Harry and I got engaged. A frayed and faded organ donor card witnessed by my college boyfriend. His looping signature, immediately recognizable after 40 years, brings back warm memories. Every 4th of July, old friends of Harry’s hosted a great street party just a few blocks from our house in Pittsburgh. Forehead Charades, or the Sticky Head Game, was a big part of the day. Dozens of us walked around with 3 x 5 cards pinned to our backs, our foreheads too slick in the July heat to hold a sticky note. I kept Harry’s clue from one year. His card says, “of Grace,” which is not a celebrity, object, or historical event, and no one guessed it, this state of being or belief that remains a mystery.
...dead yet? 