Rhizomes

Last week, while on vacation at the beach I decided to meditate. It was a great session of quiet and waves and kids laughing and sunshine all around. In this happy place, I started to think about a friend who lay dying in a hospital in Washington from pancreatic cancer. A warm, kind, dear man.

I thought of him then because my strongest memory of him is at this particular beach, sitting on his back porch having wine and talking. He and his wife were very excited to tell us about a role their son had just landed on an HBO drama. Their son played a gay man on the show and acted out a sex act. His father couldn't have been prouder of this moment in his son's career. Just a sweet, wonderful father.

From here, I got to thinking about the cancer that is killing him and how much I hate what cancer does to people's bodies, lives and families.

Then the rhizomes came in. (A rhizome is a single, connected plant system that sends out roots and shoots from its nodes. Good plants that send out underground rhizomes are ginger and turmeric, but some of the baddies are Bermuda grass and bamboo.)

Cancer is a rhizome. Growing under the surface and sending up shoots now and then to show us its evil little head. I hate cancer just as much as I hate the bamboo growing in my backyard. At first, I took to clipping my bamboo. The lady gardener approach. But it kept coming back. So then dug it out. Still, back it came. I moved to systemic herbicides - deadly plant chemo. I did fairly well for a while, but the system of bamboo is so big the chemo didn't get everywhere to kill the cancer and the plant came back.

Now, I'm just Rambo. After a good rain when the ground is soft, I take my ax and hack away at it, ripping up roots and stalks and sweating and cussing the whole time. I may be winning, but I won't know until the last little stalk of bamboo dies.

I wish I could be Rambo for my dying friend. But his rhizome is going to kill him and there's nothing to be done.