Do you know what day it is???
Me neither. But it's somewhere around the beginning of March and my birthday is coming up which means that sometime, right around this time, one year ago, I was taking my kids to get their teeth cleaned when I got a call from my doctor to tell me that I had cancer.
My therapist reminds me that there is a reason that anniversaries are significant. They hold weight, whether you want them to or not. The past month has been one long "Cancer Anniversary" because I don't know (and don't really want to know) what day marks the scariest time of my life. Was it the February day in Mexico when I found the lump? Was it the day I went in for a mammogram? Was it the day in March when I went in for a core biopsy and nearly fainted? Or was it the day my doctor called me?
Two weeks ago, Michael and I took the kids to the Bahamas for their week-long winter break, the same winter-break we were on last year when I was lounging by a pool and casually brainstorming episodic sitcoms that I was going to write and finding lumps in my breast. I was experiencing some version of post-traumatic stress for days leading up to this trip. What was I going to feel? How was I going to react? Was I going to have involuntary fits of hysteria?? None of it came to pass, partly because of my recent aversion to drama and excitement, and partly because I left my purse in a Bahamian taxi. Bear with me.
I realized I'd left it about fifteen minutes after checking in and the taxi van was not a van that belonged to the hotel. It wasn't even a van that the hotel usually hires. It was a driver that the company that the hotel hires out, hired out. Michael told me to forget it, it was gone. Try to enjoy the vacation. But I couldn't forget it and I felt like I had to act quickly. I sent him off with the kids to jump in the pool and start their vacation and then I enlisted the help of the woman who was working the bell hop desk and she tried to get people on the phone for me. We waited on hold for eternities. When someone was finally ready to talk to me, I couldn't understand a word they were saying. (They do speak in English in the Bahamas but it is the fastest English you'll ever hear and not every word is a complete one. One Bahamian described it as "We speak the way you text.") Anyway, I decided not to wait and hope for my bag to turn up. I asked for a taxi to take me back to the airport. I was going to find the van. It was ludicrous, but that's what I did.
The woman driving the taxi was name Christine, and, lucky for me, she was a friendly and out-going woman who, due to her nature, knew everyone on the island. I jumped in and told her I had to get back to the airport to find the man in the green shirt who had put us in a van that had driven us to The Reef. I didn't remember much, only that the driver was a nice man in his mid-fifties maybe. And Michael remembered that the van was dark and there was a sticker about God on the windshield.
"You mean, Mr. Woods?" Christine asked me.
Mr. Woods? Ok. Sounds good to me. Let's go find Mr. Woods.
Christine got on her phone and started making calls. We talked about all of the likely people it could be and I tried to jog my memory for any other tidbits of information. But then the excitement died down and we had a half an hour drive to the airport. We talked a bit, but I also had a lot of time to think. And I thought about how ridiculous it was that I thought I'd be experiencing post-traumatic stress in a fucking luxury hotel in the Bahamas. Instead, hyper-focused and on a mission, I realized none of this was a big deal. If I lost my purse and my wallet and my phone and my glasses, so what? It would be a pain in the ass, but I would replace them.
Christine kept telling me not to worry, we were going to find it. "We can't let your vacation start like this, oh no we cannot!! Lordy, we are going to find that purse, yes we are!!"
"If we don't, I'll be ok. I'd like to find it, but I'll survive if we don't," I told her.
"You sure?" she asked me.
"I had a rough year this past year, so all of this kind of pales in comparison." It was hard to believe I was saying it, but it was true.
"So you had cancer?" she asked. "You know, I was thinking that when you got in my cab because I was looking at you and I was thinking "American women don't wear their hair like that.'"
"Ha, ha! Some do! Ellen does."
We pull into the airport. Christine drives me through the parking lot where the taxis and the vans wait to be called and asks me if any of them look familiar. Then she pulls into the Arrivals lane and we spot Mr. Woods' van. She pulls over and I jump out and nearly get hit by a taxi. I look through the windows of the van, then I get in the van, but it's completely empty. No black purse. I jump back into Christine's taxi and we keep going. She's calling out the window to her friends "You seen Mr. Woods? You seen Mr. Woods?" Finally someone points off into the distance and we look to the left and there is Mr. Woods and he is carrying my purse. I scream. I jump out and give the very stoic Mr. Woods a bear hug and I don't let go when I should. And then I ask him to wait while I get something out of my purse for him. I hand him a "thank you" and then I give him a kiss on the cheek. I get back into Christine's taxi and she takes me back to The Reef. We are both in utter disbelief.
Christine, who is now my Facebook friend, said over and over on the cab ride back that "God loves you, Lauren. He pulled you through cancer and he found your purse and God is great. God loves you!" And I believe her, though I don't think I believe in exactly the same God that she does. I hadn't put it into words until recently, when, for some reason out of the blue, Willa asked me who god was. I told her god is an idea or a force or an energy and everybody thinks about it in a different way but they call it the same thing. I think the closest I've come to understanding my own understanding of god is in this past year. Thinking back on the past twelve months is almost impossible. So much of it is so unbearable to think about and go through again, even if it's just in my memory. But if I close my eyes and feel what the last year was, I know what it feels like. It feels like my family and friends, my husband and kids, my dads and moms, my sisters and brothers and aunts and uncles and in-laws who all came to my rescue and loved me and cared for me and healed me. I don't think that I ever knew, until this past year, how much love there was around me. It was eye-opening and life-changing to have all of that love directed at me at once.
I don't think that god returned my purse to me in the Bahamas. I think a whole lot of very nice people reached out to help a stranger and that's how I got my purse back. And all of that energy, all put together, that is god.
