All Things Teal--For my Em

This is the second post from my friend Tabbatha Collier's Month of All Things Teal campaign on her Facebook page Styled to a T. You can read Amy's story It Whispers here. This week's story is a little something from me.

Me and my Em

“I wanted you to see what courage is…. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.”  -Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird

I don’t like to write about my friend Emily. I’ll talk about her all day long, but writing about her never seems to work out for me. There’s something about the permanence of words on a page that takes away from what I want to say. It is the only time I ever feel limited by writing. Usually, the act of writing frees me. But trying to capture on a page what Em meant to me, what she still means to me every single day, is not something I am capable of doing.

But I keep trying.

I keep beginning again, even though I'm pretty sure the next draft will suck as much as the previous ones, because by trying I am practicing what Em taught me. Courage.

When we were twenty-three, Em was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. As is common with ovarian cancer, she was diagnosed at a late stage in the disease’s development. By the time Em was diagnosed, both her ovaries had to be removed due to massive tumors. She was twenty-three. I know I’ve already said that, but twenty-three! We were so young! She fought for nine years.

Years later, in our thirties, Em was still kicking cancer’s ass. I sat with her in a chemo room and watched a nurse hook Emily up to a clear bag of chemicals so potent the nurse was required to wear what amounted to a HAZMAT suit while handling it. Am I making this picture clear? A nurse in a blue suit made of impermeable plastic (including gloves up to her armpits, a full apron, booties, and a face guard) came at my friend with a bag of toxins, her sole purpose being to flood Em’s insides with poison.

I keep this picture on my writing desk
in a frame that reads, "Inspire." We write
together every day.

I’d watched the whole procedure during Em’s previous chemo treatments. Everything was routine. It wasn’t like I’d never seen the suit before that day. The bag of chemo looked the same as last time. The room was the same. Everything was just as it was supposed to be except that I was watching Em’s face just at the moment that a whisper of fear snuck across it. Everything inside of me erupted with anger, panic, sadness, and a whole pantheon of emotions I can’t even begin to name.

My Em was afraid. My brave Em.

It was only a flicker of fear, one she conquered with a smile and a joke for the nurse, but that moment changed my life. Em did exactly what my hero Atticus Finch was saying. She knew she may not win a fight against ovarian cancer, but she if she had to lose, it’d be with a fight and a whole lot of laughs. I was watching courage in action that day.

Em may have been afraid, but she never once backed down from her fight. She never once lost all hope. She must have known, there at the end, lying in her childhood bedroom, the same one we’d played in and dreamed in all those years ago, that a cure would come too late for her. She must have. But she was determined to see her fight through, to fill her life with friends and laughter and so, so, so much love.

I think it’s common for us here on Earth to feel like we rarely win. But having had Em in my life, having had the privilege to call her friend, was the best kind of win for me. I realized, sitting in that sun-drenched hospital room, that whatever I wanted in life, no matter how much failure may terrify me, I have to try. For Em.

And so I did. I wrote a book. A whole book. All for my Em.

The dedication page of Love and Other Unknown Variables