we are the coolest
The first time I met Molly in person, I was coming off a morning spent roaming the aisles at Target, contemplating the fact that, depending how you sliced the statistics, there was a ten percent chance I would be dead in five years. It was 2013.
Then I remembered that coffee existed, and I got some and dried my eyes. I sat down at Swork and waited for Molly to find me, which wasn't hard to do because I was the only bald woman in the place.
She told me her story, which is to say her cancer story, which was of course only a piece of her story. She'd reached out to me at Poets & Writers about a Poets & Writers thing, but in the process she'd come across my blog, so she added a P.S. to her email: "If you ever want to talk to someone who went through the same thing at a similar age...." And here we were, talking. About fake boobs and prognoses and the super annoying social worker who'd crossed both our paths.
I admitted: "I just feel so old and creaky and uncool."
Molly was more than a year out of treatment. Her blonde hair had grown back. She was starting a new micro fiction collective.
"Are you kidding?" she said. "I think we're the coolest."
She was so undeniably cool--the way she talked and wrote and moved through the world--that I instantly believed her.
For a few months, we were fast friends. I joined her collective and hung out a couple of times at the loft she shared with her then-husband in Atwater Village. I had some kind of art/cancer/sister crush on her. Navigating a world people tried to avoid, I'd finally found someone aspirational.
And then she slowly drifted away, admitting in an email that she was struggling with depression, which was not new for her and which her oncologist said was common a couple of years after cancer treatment. I circled back to her blog and her Facebook page now and then, looking for proof she was still healthy and hoping she'd still want to be friends. She was mostly quiet.
Then, in January 2017, she shared a long, unflinchingly honest, un-self-pitying Facebook post: She'd been living with metastatic breast cancer since 2015 and writing about it anonymously (until now) on a blog that I devoured instantly. A rich meal that made me sick even as I ate it.
She wrote beautifully. She said things I'd thought about and shared wisdom I hoped I would arrive at if I got to the point of Stage IV. I did what everyone does when reading, even about fictional people, which was to slide inside her narrative. It was a slippery and dangerous and irresistible task. I hadn't seen her in a few years and so she became Molly The Story, even as she was Molly The Writer and Molly The Person. I was mindful of all the ways it was unfair to Molly The Person to project my own fears onto her, even though Molly The Writer was aware of this inevitability and wrote about her own projections.
Death is the process of transitioning from Writer to Story, whether you are a literal writer or not. Story is a kind of earthly immortality, although I hope there are other kinds. Writers try to trick death by telling our own stories, even though most of us know we will be digital ghosts at best, not Shakespeare, not even suggested summer reading.
I'm telling you about Molly right now because this morning I saw these tweets.
Until now, she's been the one telling her story, which is as it should be. At Homeboy and now at 826LA, we talk a lot about the power of claiming and telling your story, and it's easy to forget what what it actually means, though it is also easy to remember, to be pulled back to earth by this gut-level truth. I say that storytelling is my own religion, and like any faith, I can't quite explain it. Like any faith, it takes work. It can be lost. It can be exploited.
At this actual moment, I don't know if Molly is still alive. I feel like I'm floating and sinking at the same time. But in handing over language, she is passing the baton, making her peace with becoming story rather than teller. (We are all teller. We are all story.)
I didn't know if she would read my reply--I doubted it--but I wrote: "I think about you all the time. Thank you for showing me and others that honesty in is art. I love you."
Then I saw my typo and corrected: "*honesty is art."
Her probably-final tweet contained typos; she was a meticulous person and a methodical writer, and I suspected she was on some heavy medications. I thought about my dumb correction, a bratty little assertion that I still existed in a world where not only did language matter, but "correct" language.
It buoys me that Molly is walking boldly into the post-language realm with love and lightness. We should all be so lucky. She described a friend who died of cancer as a "sherpa" to others, and while I'm as superstitiously, anxiously, cautiously optimistic about my next cancer check-up as ever, if I have to climb that mountain, I want Molly as my sherpa.
Then I remembered that coffee existed, and I got some and dried my eyes. I sat down at Swork and waited for Molly to find me, which wasn't hard to do because I was the only bald woman in the place.
She told me her story, which is to say her cancer story, which was of course only a piece of her story. She'd reached out to me at Poets & Writers about a Poets & Writers thing, but in the process she'd come across my blog, so she added a P.S. to her email: "If you ever want to talk to someone who went through the same thing at a similar age...." And here we were, talking. About fake boobs and prognoses and the super annoying social worker who'd crossed both our paths.
I admitted: "I just feel so old and creaky and uncool."
Molly was more than a year out of treatment. Her blonde hair had grown back. She was starting a new micro fiction collective.
"Are you kidding?" she said. "I think we're the coolest."
She was so undeniably cool--the way she talked and wrote and moved through the world--that I instantly believed her.
 |
| Molly on the runway in 2017. One badass thing among many. |
And then she slowly drifted away, admitting in an email that she was struggling with depression, which was not new for her and which her oncologist said was common a couple of years after cancer treatment. I circled back to her blog and her Facebook page now and then, looking for proof she was still healthy and hoping she'd still want to be friends. She was mostly quiet.
Then, in January 2017, she shared a long, unflinchingly honest, un-self-pitying Facebook post: She'd been living with metastatic breast cancer since 2015 and writing about it anonymously (until now) on a blog that I devoured instantly. A rich meal that made me sick even as I ate it.
She wrote beautifully. She said things I'd thought about and shared wisdom I hoped I would arrive at if I got to the point of Stage IV. I did what everyone does when reading, even about fictional people, which was to slide inside her narrative. It was a slippery and dangerous and irresistible task. I hadn't seen her in a few years and so she became Molly The Story, even as she was Molly The Writer and Molly The Person. I was mindful of all the ways it was unfair to Molly The Person to project my own fears onto her, even though Molly The Writer was aware of this inevitability and wrote about her own projections.
Death is the process of transitioning from Writer to Story, whether you are a literal writer or not. Story is a kind of earthly immortality, although I hope there are other kinds. Writers try to trick death by telling our own stories, even though most of us know we will be digital ghosts at best, not Shakespeare, not even suggested summer reading.
I'm telling you about Molly right now because this morning I saw these tweets.
Until now, she's been the one telling her story, which is as it should be. At Homeboy and now at 826LA, we talk a lot about the power of claiming and telling your story, and it's easy to forget what what it actually means, though it is also easy to remember, to be pulled back to earth by this gut-level truth. I say that storytelling is my own religion, and like any faith, I can't quite explain it. Like any faith, it takes work. It can be lost. It can be exploited.
At this actual moment, I don't know if Molly is still alive. I feel like I'm floating and sinking at the same time. But in handing over language, she is passing the baton, making her peace with becoming story rather than teller. (We are all teller. We are all story.)
I didn't know if she would read my reply--I doubted it--but I wrote: "I think about you all the time. Thank you for showing me and others that honesty in is art. I love you."
Then I saw my typo and corrected: "*honesty is art."
Her probably-final tweet contained typos; she was a meticulous person and a methodical writer, and I suspected she was on some heavy medications. I thought about my dumb correction, a bratty little assertion that I still existed in a world where not only did language matter, but "correct" language.
It buoys me that Molly is walking boldly into the post-language realm with love and lightness. We should all be so lucky. She described a friend who died of cancer as a "sherpa" to others, and while I'm as superstitiously, anxiously, cautiously optimistic about my next cancer check-up as ever, if I have to climb that mountain, I want Molly as my sherpa.
Comments