Eva Hagberg Fisher, «How to Be Loved: A Memoir of Lifesaving F | Lemix

Eva Hagberg Fisher, «How to Be Loved: A Memoir of Lifesaving Friendship»:

Her cancer came back and I felt that I should do something because that’s what everyone else around me seemed to be doing—extra hugs and sideways head tilts and the look that said at once “I pity you and I am afraid of you,” and I would watch myself looking at her body—her thin arms and her huge butt—and I would wonder where the cancer was and where the chemo was and how she was being treated and also how it felt to be in her body.

Did cancer hurt? And I wondered why she wasn’t used to it—why it seemed like this was such a big deal for her. I’d heard her talk about chemo and surgeries and radiations, and most of all her fear of CT scans, her nervous anxiety that made her talk for longer than the four minutes we informally allotted each person, and I didn’t understand how she wasn’t used to it by now. I was used to it—to her having cancer. And I couldn’t imagine, couldn’t fathom, a life that was lived between scans, where each prospect of that whirring tube was more terrifying than the last.

(Until I joined her.)

I didn’t yet know how to be with her in a meaningful way, but I knew that I could bring food, enjoyed feeling like I was being of service, and useful, could proudly report to my spiritual guide that I had done a good deed that week, and so one Friday night I offered to bring Allison dinner from the Whole Foods near her house, and she accepted, gratefully, and I arrived, and we sat down at her kitchen table and she told me about her cancer, about where it was, and I said things like “I can’t imagine” as I slowly shook my head in the performance of baffled confusion in the face of a kind person’s illness that I’d seen others do.

“It’s everywhere in my liver,” she said, holding and stroking her right side with her right hand as with the other hand she took a bite of roast chicken, of the broccoli she loved. I didn’t even know the liver was on the right side. I didn’t know how badly cancer could hurt.

“TV on the bed?” she asked, as I cleared her plate and threw out my paper box of macaroni and cheese.

I’d only ever gotten in bed with someone I’d been having sex with. I thought of the artist Tracey Emin’s tent, embroidered with the names of, as it was titled, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, and how I’d seen it in London during the Sensation show in 1999, and how I’d assumed, of course, that everyone listed would be someone she’d had sex with, but her mother was on there, her friends. I’d never been in bed with someone, been so intimate with someone that I wasn’t trying to sleep with, and the categories, now that we were about to get in bed together, confused me. I couldn’t figure out where to slot Allison—was she a sick old woman I was helping? Was she a sick wise sage who was helping me? Was she someone I was going to have sex with?

I helped her up and we walked into the bedroom, its bed pushed to the corner, a huge TV on the wall, and every surface—the long desk, two chairs, the bookshelves, the top of the bookshelves—covered in stacks of books. Strout, the Ann/es (Patchett and Tyler), Lively, Colwin. Everything she read had the same strand of inquiry, the same question. How should we live? And the room smelled, of laundry, which she did every day, but also of a faint but bright acidity, a smell I categorized as belonging to her specifically until I smelled it again, years later, in an oncology suite bathroom, and almost fell to the floor from recognition and grief.