Choice

I’m talking about fear. Fear of something terrible happening. Fear that lives beneath the surface. Fear you do not consciously fathom becoming reality. Tangible fear. You may ask, how can fear be tangible? Fear becomes tangible when it embodies a human. Can you reach out and touch me? So, too, can you touch fear.

I am no stranger to fear. Is anyone? Formative years of my life were plagued by fear. Wasn’t everyone’s? I’d imagine the chronically late person picking me up from practice lying half-dead in the middle of the road somewhere. Fear is a child who has been forgotten more than once.

Fear infiltrated my life in other ways. At eight years old I developed a fear of rabies after watching the headliner on the evening news: Stay Inside, Human Rabies. From that day forward, I’d sprint off the bus down the long driveway to our house in the woods, breathless by the time I reached the front door. In one-fell-swoop, I’d jam the key into the lock and close the door behind me turning to scan the field across from the house. No animals, today. “You know where the guns are if I am not here,” my stepfather said the day he taught me and my sister how to shoot a rifle. For protection. From wild animals. The ones that had rabies. Had he intended to drain our fear by replacing it with control? A sense of control staves off fear, yet the baseline of fear never goes away. The, what if?

Nightmares of a controlled situation turned fruitless haunted me. In the nightmare, the foaming mouthed coyotes are charging the house. No one is home. The eight-year-old me just ran off the bus through the front door to the cabinet of rifles I know how to use. I’ve forgotten how to load the bullets. The guns are useless to me now unless I figure out how to load the bullets. In my dream, I realize control is made-up. Have I known this since I was eight? Adults in control of a situation are just pretending. I load the bullets.

As I grew older, I’d try to control my fears by reading about them. I’d analyze the literature. I went to work in the field of my fears. When I feared my families alcohlism, I tended a bar. When I feared I’d end up a spinster, I planned weddings. When I feared my loved ones were going to die, I became a nurse. When I feared my love ones dying of cancer, I applied to graduate school to become a nurse practitioner so to one day become an oncology nurse researcher. Then, I found the tumor. In that order. The tumor that grew inside of June.

When June was diagnosed with cancer, there existed one treatment option, which for June was all wrong. It didn’t work. Loading the gun meant nothing because the bullets were blanks. There were rabid coyotes already in the house.

In the wake of June’s death, I asked myself, “Could I have done something differently for June?” I lived under the assumption that we didn’t do everything possible because June died. Because she’s not playing upstairs with her sister and brother right now. Because although we had weaponry and ammunition, it didn’t kill the cancer. 

My stepfather didn’t keep blanks in the cabinet, but in the nightmare that’s all that existed. It was too late. I loaded the gun anyway. There was no other option. The impact of being hit with the blank bullet was better than not being hit at all. I might survive the attack. I kept firing. What was my other option? To just give up?

I imagine my eight-year-old self standing in front of the glass cabinet deciding which rifle to use and which box of bullets to load which are, unbeknownst to me, all blanks. I imagine the oncologist sitting at their desk, in front of a stack of textbooks and a laptop, flipping through pages in search of the treatment option for June. The oncologist knows there is only one treatment option, but continues to review the literature anyway. The coyotes are encroaching. The tumor is growing. I load the gun. The oncologist confers with their team. They make their way to the little room we sit in as a family awaiting a choice. Which will it be? Life or death? We don’t get to decide. The only choice we have is how we will react to the loss of control when we are presented with one option.

What if? I feared.

What if the treatment doesn’t work?

What if the toxic treatment nearly kills June?

What if the cancer returns?

What if these bullets are blank?

But, what if?

“You can’t live in the ‘what if’, Taryn,” my husband said to me more than once during June’s treatment.

The big what if that I want an answer to is this: What if it all worked out? What if the bullets were real? What if the treatment worked? What if there was more than one option? June might have lived.

I can imagine that we had it right all along. I can imagine the oncologists did, too. I can imagine June lived to see her second birthday. I do imagine what our lives would have been like if it all worked out. 

I also wonder if this is what life looks like when it does all work out. The life I live today. What if everything is going to be okay?

To whom does that choice belong?