Prostate Cancer and Sex, part 3

December 11,2008

The amazing thing about living with someone for forty plus years is the depth and breadth of the relationship. Life becomes a kind of endless dance where we anticipate each other’s moves and swirl gracefully into them. And that dance includes finishing each other’s sentences, knowing what scene in our past this current scene makes us think of, even getting up at the same time in the night to go to the bathroom (thank the lord for houses with two bathrooms). Of course that dance extends to sex. A certain look (yes, there actually is THAT look), a certain phrase, a certain wiggle or giggle, and the deal is on. This much time on dishes, that much time on email or tv or phone calls, or wine drinking, and then up to the bed and the, ah, consummation. If that look happens at breakfast, there is an entire day of something akin to squirming, waiting, anticipating. The drive home is sweeter, the meal tastier, the book less interesting. And if it doesn’t happen today—the day was rotten at work, a cold or headache started (for real), exhaustion kicks in—that is ok, because there is tomorrow. There is a basis, a bed rock, to life together, an understanding, an understanding that this important union is always possible, always there, always part of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. It is the air we like birds fly through, the water like fish we swim in, always there. And now it is gone.

As I said in an earlier post, really gone. Images, situations, fantasies that used to work, not only don’t, they seem remote, even silly. So there I am, full of lupron, the testosterone done, the psa down, the desire not down, gone. And what of that dance, that air, that water? Gone?

For some people it is gone, and their marriage is over. Ours didn’t happen that way. Instead, I discovered--I think I always knew it, but was never tested—that we had woven a strong cloth and the sex was just one of the threads. The cloth didn’t unravel. All those years of traveling together, acting together—the kids, the book, the family crises, the parental deaths and worse the run up to those deaths, the laughter, the meals, the sense that we, together could accomplish anything, could get through anything, all of that kicked in. The rug got pulled out from under me but I landed in her arms. Her smile still there, her eyes like they sparkled on our wedding day (and among other days those when they were conceived), like they sparkled when we strode into Siyeh pass the first time, or the time we touched Emerald Glacier. Or the time she got off the train in Raleigh, just back from Europe, her hair short, wearing the scarf and coat it took me years to let her give away, that moment when the deal went down.

At any rate our history, alive as it is in the moment, and in the forecast for the future, sprung alive in a way that surprised me. Those moments, glances, dropped code words, gone, but not the support not the joining, the joining of a different type than sex, but, it turns out, as powerful. And so we can make fun of ourselves in situations that would have led to ‘intimacy,’ now passing at best with a smart crack and at worst unnoticed. I have had to learn to be sure to touch, to soothe, to run fingers through hair, to, with all the thrill of a 14-year old, cop a feel, accidentally run my hand over her ass, give a kiss. What can I say? I have been blessed with an incredible gift from cancer—an awareness of a depth that I not only did not know I had but didn’t know existed. I trust that the lupron and its effects will pass (at the end of May) and that at least some of the old way, old dance will return, but it will be so much richer for what I have found and can live now. Cancer gives strange gifts.