Heather:

When I was initially diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease I characterized it as an act of terror.  By doing that I abnegated any responsibility for my circumstance. I did nothing wrong—there was nothing I could do to have prevented the disease, it was like getting on a bus that just happened to have a bomb on it.  I did not feel weak.  I did not feel that I was to blame.  It was a random, utterly arbitrary occurrence that just happened to have victimized me.  It would not come back.

When it did come back, my sense of disease as terrorism intensified.  It became a manifestation of fear.  Cancer was the terrorist bomb that could explode within my body at any moment.  I became jittery and tentative—vigilant to anything out of the ordinary.  I lived in fear, and I lived quietly, unwilling to make commitments to people or things, I locked myself indoors for worry of the terrorist threat within my body.

I am trying to stop that.

As always,

Anderson

Her legs had been amputated just above the knees and parts of her fingers were missing, too. The area where her fingers stumped were swollen, red and bleeding, and smears of blood were all over her sweatpants, jacket and the two bags of cat food she was looking to buy. He hair was a dangerous nest of possibility and her eyes were angry and lost. She was talking, in a fractured but not incoherent kind of way, but it wasn’t clear to whom, and as she was doing this she was cutting the line. The security guard, moving in an I-hate-my-job way, was coming over to stop her, while the cashier, with a look of horror on her face, recoiled.

I did not know what I should do. The suffering and need of this woman could not be more vivid. I wanted to be Jesus, I wanted to selflessly love and help her, but I did not.

I stood there paralyzed, thinking about the blood-streaked bags of cat food on her lap and how they were going to get from there to the cash. I did not want to be a part of that process and so I decided to buy the cat food for her. This cost $4. I did this out of self-interest rather than altruism. The cashier and everybody in line seemed relieved.

Then one of the bags fell from her lap to the floor– as if a bell tolling, a command to be more involved in her suffering than I was willing to be. Again, I just stood there, waiting for somebody else to become alive to this moment, and then I saw something in her hands that looked a lipstick container and it struck me that perhaps this was all a performance and she had smeared lipstick on herself in order to look like blood and garner sympathy! It was an act!

It was an astonishing cognitive leap, this. There are homeless, broken people all over Toronto, and in order to inure ourselves to this procession of misery, we have to believe there’s a level of performance to the suffering. We construct ridiculous narratives that keep us distant from those asking for our help. Maybe it was all just a ruse, but no, no. This woman needed to buy cat food– either to eat or to feed to the one point of light in her life–and there was blood all over it and it was lying on the floor two feet from where I stood.

For what felt like a minute but was probably closer to 20 seconds, nobody did a thing, and then a woman bent down and with a gloved hand picked up the bag of cat food and returned it to the woman’s lap, the security guard then rolled the panhandler out, and the rest of us continued with our day as if nothing had happened.