Day 12: Christine Mason Miller

Community Project

Oct 16

Invincible Winter

Impossible: a word I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Impossible as in futile, unfeasible, out of the question. Impossible as in beyond the bounds of possibility. It feels like such a hard word, Impossible, what with its immobile, capital I sending a stern, unambiguous message: “Quit your wishful thinking,” it proclaims, “Possibility stops here.”

And yet I can’t help but wonder, under the circumstances I’m living in this moment, if impossibility isn’t a hidden gateway to freedom—a back door to a deeper kind of presence, one that doesn’t require me to expend energy wanting a situation to be something other than exactly what it is.

After a devastating estrangement, I reconciled with my dad last November. Five months later he was diagnosed with advanced small cell carcinoma—a rare, aggressive cancer that had made its way through numerous vital organs by the time it was discovered. The current prognosis is three to six months. He starts his second chemotherapy regimen next week.

The story I’ve been telling since last fall is simple: I went to Oklahoma to see my dad after a thirteen-year separation and I came back home a different person. What this means, exactly, has been difficult to articulate. It isn’t something I’ve been able to explain or even write about; it is something I’ve felt in my bones, an experience I knew needed stillness and darkness to become fully formed. As if channeling the lotus, I let the mystery of what was happening within me lie dormant in dark, muddy waters. If I had tried too soon to describe the meaning of my story—I came back a different person—the experience would be gone.

When the cancer diagnosis came through so soon after our reconnection, this immersion went even deeper. I retreated from most everything—artistic work, social media, friends—in order to practically drown in the reality of the situation. In between visits with my dad, which were always planned around his chemo treatments, my creative energies were channeled into my garden. I spent hours pulling weeds, hauled enough mulch to fill a Volkswagen, and planted dozens of plants and flowers—lamb’s ear, celosia, and bee balm. I watched my garden explode into life as June drifted toward August and now, with October right around the corner, I am witnessing a different kind of transformation. The daisies have all turned brown. The coneflowers are splayed outward, each stem surrendering to the effect of gravity and cooler temperatures. After all the effort and sweat and dirt under my fingernails, I am watching it all fade, already imagining what it will look like under a blanket of white after Milwaukee’s first snowfall.

Albert Camus said, “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” While trying to come to terms with my dad’s cancer as I nurtured my garden, I was living the inverse: In the midst of summer, I found, within me, an invincible winter—an ability to devote myself to a rich internal life and quietude in eighty-degree weather and the lively hum of a happy garden that was home to birds, bees, butterflies, rabbits, deer, and turkeys. All the while watching my dad endure countless appointments, procedures, tests, scans, and surgeries. All the while knowing his time on earth is dwindling—that he, too, will go gently to the earth, much sooner than any of us expected.

The idea of a miracle fluttering toward us like a newly sprung monarch is a beautiful idea. Of course a wildly unexpected, against-all-odds recovery is something I want. But the facts of all the aforementioned appointments, procedures, tests, scans, and surgeries paint a very different picture—one that feels like it is shrinking as time marches on and cancer markers go up. The road ahead isn’t entirely hopeless—this week’s three to six months prognosis was better than what we thought would happen—but it is certain enough to know any time and energy I spend asking for an outcome that is not, sadly, possible will only serve to uproot me from the time I have with my dad right now. My dad has cancer. The cancer is going to win. With that reality before us, my intention is singular and determined: I’m all in. For whatever is to come.

What I believed, for a long time, was that it would be impossible to have a relationship with my dad. I believed it was impossible for the two of us to sincerely like each other. I believed it was impossible to relax in his presence. I believed it was impossible for us to recover from our past. And yet here we are—putting all those impossibilities to rest, enjoying each other’s company as if it were the most natural thing in the world, despite cancer and chemotherapy and the dark shadow of mortality. We are now on this path—messy and infuriating as it is—together, and it will lead us both, in the end, to redemption. I don’t need to keep asking for the impossible; the miracle has already happened. I’ve been released from a cage I’ve had the key to all along and now I’m free—to practice radical acceptance, and love as deeply as I can.

Christine Mason Miller is a writer and artist who lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her most recent book, The Meandering River of Unfathomable Joy: Finding God and Gratitude in India, is available on Amazon.com.

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