Books for Breasts!

Followers of my blogs, and the readers who read the acknowledgement pages of my books, will know that I lost my partner Laura Herrmann to breast cancer in May 2006. I've been interested in cancer research since then and have privately made contributions to cancer related charities, but I've never put out any sort of appeal on my blogs to solicit for this cause, until now.

Last week, I received several cases of my latest book Dragonseed. One of the ongoing themes of Dragonseed is the idea of healing, both from physical and spiritual wounds. Within the book there's a miraculous object called a dragonseed: Eat the seed, and all your injuries will be healed. Even your oldest scars will vanish.

I have some science fiction hoodoo underlying the dragonseed. The technology to create a pill that will both diagnose and cure any illness is pretty far out in our future, if it exists at all. But, the part of this that isn't science fiction or hoodoo is that I believe that technology has the power to work miracles. We have MRI and PET scans that can look into a human body and see it working in minute detail. We have developed surgical tools and techniques that can remove diseased tissues from a human body without doing undo damage to healthy tissues. My father had a heart attack recently, and the doctors had to place stents in his arteries. The incision to perform the operation was small enough to cover with a band-aid. And, right now, there are researchers who are taking apart cancer cells molecule by molecule to understand the genetic engines that drive them to a degree unimaginable only a few decades ago.

We live in an age of miracles because we live in an age of knowledge. Modern computers are finally powerful enough to process all the complex data contained within a human cell. The only barriers remaining between our present understanding a cure for any disease you can name are time and money.

These are not insignificant barriers. New technologies are always expensive. And, to be blunt, the world has a limited supply of really smart people, and a nearly unlimited supply of problems for them to solve. For better or worse, money is one of the most important driving forces of where the smart people focus their energies. In the sixties, it was decided we would put a man on the moon. We threw money at the problem, and produced a glut of rocket scientists. In the eighties and nineties, computer technology was fed enormous sums of money by the stock market, and smart people focused their energies on designing hardware and software, and with the result that today my cell phone has more memory than I do. There is a lot of money today flowing into health care, but only a fraction of this money goes to research of any given disease. I'd like to invite you to increase the fraction going to breast cancer research, both due to my personal connection to the cause, and because I think that this is the right moment in history to truly make a difference. I firmly believe this is a disease than can be cured within our lifetime. I don't know if one day we will simply swallow a magic pill and be healed, but I do know that the day will come when we will be able to profile any cancer cell and match it with the appropriate drug to wipe it out.

To help bring this day closer, if only by a minute or two, I'd like to announce my "Books for Breasts" promotion. Anyone who contributes to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation through the "Team Dragon" fundraising page will get a free signed copy of Dragonseed.

You can contribute to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer foundation by clicking here. This will take you to my personal fundraising page; just click the button that says "support James." Then, to get your signed copy of Dragonseed, just email me your mailing address to nobodynovelwriter@yahoo.com. I've set aside 50 copies for this cause; if I give them all away by the end of July, I'm pretty sure I can get my hands on another 50.

I've set up a modest goal of raising $300* through this promotion. This means I need to average contributions of $6, which is less than you'd pay for the book on Amazon. However, I'll send you a book for a contribution in any amount, even if it's just a buck. Spend a buck, get a book, save some breasts. Who's with me?

*Okay, I obviously seriously underestimated the generosity of my readers. I hit $300 in under 24 hours. So, I'm going to raise my goal to $1000. Thank you to everyone who's given so far, and everyone who has helped spread the word via blogs and twitter. If I run out of books, I've had some interest from other writers in contributing their books to the cause. I'll keep you posted if it comes to this.

One year

Laura died one year ago today. I remember that morning, driving home from the hospital, listening to "The Coroner's Gambit" on my car stereo, watching the morning getting lighter after an all night vigil at the hospital. My emotions that morning weren't so much sorrow as exhaustion. I had a hard time thinking or feeling anything about what had happened that night. I just wanted to get some sleep, then deal with the grief at a later time.

I have grieved over the past year, but the experience wasn't anything like what I imagined during Laura's final months. I expected to be devastated, to have a difficult time getting out of bed, to be, at the very least, depressed for weeks and months.

But, in the immediate aftermath, I discovered that the predominant thing I felt was busy. There were phone calls to be made and arrangements to be decided on and a houseful of people who had needs that would have to be addressed. Then, once all that was gone, I had a whole different rush of stuff. I had a book under contract I needed to rewrite, I had to find a new place to live, then I had to renovate a house, then move in, then more writing, and then it was Valentine's Day and then Laura's Birthday and now the anniversary of her death and I find myself wondering if I somehow did it wrong. I didn't go out and wear black for a year. I made several trips to Laura's grave and placed flowers, but I didn't sit by the grave and have long conversations the way you see in movies.

I visited the grave today, the photos of the flowers are flowers that Simon and Veronica picked for her yesterday. I bought some vases and arranged the flowers and we placed them at the grave as a light rain fell. Then, last night the rain really came down, and I woke up this morning certain that the vases had fallen over. I drove back out this morning and found that my suspicions were correct and I propped the vases back up and fixed the flowers. My hunch is I won't be the only person to visit the grave today, and I wanted it to look nice.

It struck me that even today it wasn't grief that motivated my visit as much as it was an immediate task, doing something that needed to be done.

I think Laura would understand. Laura was the person who had to face the reality that she wasn't going to beat the cancer. Her main mechanism for coping with the darkness in her future was to concentrate on her present. She couldn't let despair pin her to the bed, because she had to get up to drive her kids to school, then do laundry, then go shopping, and she did these things well past the point where she felt comfortable doing them. A large secret to her living with cancer as long as she did was simple momentum. She just stayed too busy to die. But, eventually, her energy began to wane.

The picture below of Laura on the couch with Yoshi is from March 17 of last year. This is a fairly representative picture of Laura during the last few months of her life. She's stretched out on the couch because she didn't really have the energy to do much else. Yoshi, her cat, really bonded with her during this time. And, you can tell from the smile, she was still happy. She wasn't healthy any more, and it hurt her to walk or sit or lie still or breathe, and somehow she was, on the whole, still happy. Even on the last day I spent with her while she was conscious, she was cracking jokes, and happy to see visitors. She enjoyed her life. She lived each day to whatever degree her body allowed.

A few weeks before she died, she was laying on the couch in a pose much like this. It was on the weekend, mid-afternoon, and she was still in her pajamas. I asked her if she wanted to go get something to eat. She didn't. She really had no appetite at all by that point. She was always dealing with a certain amount of pain, and didn't feel like going anywhere or seeing anyone, but she was also tired of being in the house. So, I told her we could just go drive around in the country and enjoy the nice spring weather. I wanted to see her up and active, for her to feel like she was living instead of just surviving.

She changed clothes and we went out to the car. She leaned the car seat back as we drove up 54 and I kept turning down side roads to take us deeper into the country. There are a lot of roads that go off 54 and I'd always wondered where they led to. We passed countless rolling fields of yellow and blue wildflowers and wound up in Saxapahaw and drove over the river there, a nice little scenic gorge. We later wound up at a fruit stand near Mebane where I went in and bought her a Jarito's mineral water, and on the way home we found a Sonic Drive-in and she asked me to stop so she could get some tater tots.

I know it's crazy, but I don't think I've ever had a moment of such clear and wonderful hope as I did watching her eat those tater tots. She was hungry, and she was happy, and the fresh spring air and beautiful scenery seemed to have revived her, at least for the moment. I knew, I knew she was dying, but I believed in the healing power of weekend drives, and fields of wildflowers, and fresh air and sunshine and tater tots, and I thought we would be making these trips for a long, long time.

It's that day I remember, more than the hospital. It's that day I remember, more than the funeral home, or the church, or the cemetary. It's a drive I've taken several times since, or a drive like it, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends. I'll just go out for a drive in the country, and I'll see a road, and wonder, where does that go? And I turn the wheel, and follow the new road, and I watch the fields pass by.

Things Few People Know About Me #4: My Most Regreted Words

I worked late tonight. It was almost dark when I left, pitch black a half hour later when I arrived at the graveyard. I placed some tulips on Laura's grave. It was a little tricky to find in the dark. If it weren't for the little trinkets placed at the marker by her friend Anke I would have had to resort to attempting to read the little placards by the light of my cell phone.

I didn't stay long. It was dark and cold, and I had the galleys to Bitterwood in my car waiting to be proofread. I've told my publisher I'd get my notes to him by next Monday. I keep hearing this ticking clock in my skull now. I went to a restaurant and ate some hot wings while I proofed another two chapters. All of it had a very familiar feel.

Because the last time I spoke to Laura when she was awake, I had a copy of Bitterwood in my hands. This was back in May; Solaris had told me in March they wanted the book but it needed to be expanded. I waited a few months while the details of the deal were hammered out, but at the end of April I printed a copy of the book and started a read through making intensive notes, trying to figure out where I was going to put 40,000 new words into my tightly plotted novel. Of course, right around this time was when Laura started getting really, really sick. Every other day there was some new crisis. So, I hadn't made much progress when we made out last trip to the emergency room. I took along the copy of the manuscript. My hospital experience was that there would be long hours of waiting while they had Laura off for x-rays and exams. We went to the ER at night. They checked Laura into a room after midnight. They were having trouble getting her oxygen levels to a safe zone. Then, they put her on an oxygen mask and she started improving. I went home that night and slept, then went back the next morning early and spent the day sitting in her hospital room. It was a nice room, one one of the upper floors of the hospital, with a terrific view. The room was also private, unlike the last room she'd had which she'd shared with a person with a very concerned, and very large, and very loud family. We joked that the room was better than some of the hotels we'd stayed at.

I spent a lot of that day reading Bitterwood. Laura's friends and family came by in a steady stream. I'd sit in the corner and read while people talked. My focus that day was really more on the book than on her.

Around 6:30 that night her friend Cheryl came buy and planned to stay the evening. Laura seemed to be doing pretty well. She hadn't eaten anything all day, but her oxygen levels were just barely below normal; it seemed like the oxygen mask was going to make a difference. I wanted to leave. I had spent all but maybe 7 of the previous 24 hours in the hospital. I told Laura I was going to go eat, take a shower, get some rest. They had actually offered Laura the opportunity to be discharged that night, since her vital signs were okay. It seemed like the immediate crisis had passed. She decided she'd feel better if she stayed one more night in the hospital, just to be sure the oxygen mask was doing the trick. I told her I'd come back in the morning to bring her home. She be on oxygen from then on... it would be an adjustment, but it wasn't the end of the world.

I left... and went to my Writer's Group, which always met Wednesday's at 7:00. I didn't tell Laura I was going to the group; I told her I was going to eat, then go home. It seemed okay to tell her I was leaving because I was hungry and tired. It seemed shameful to tell her I was leaving because I wanted to go hang out with other writers and talk about writing for a few hours rather than sit around in that hospital room for another evening. It wasn't a straight-up lie, only a lie of ommission, but it currently stands as the thing I most regret saying, or not saying.

It's not that Laura valued me for my honesty. I think, really, I was often useful to her when I was there to lie to her. Doctors would come in with bad news and once the doctor left the room I'd be able to spin it into good news. The doctors would tell her that a tumor had grown by 2 millimeters, for instance. I'd show her how tiny that was; if her tumors only crept along at millimeters per month, she had a long time left, I assured her. There was a long line of medical report over the years that kept telling her, in more clinical terms, "You're screwed!" I was there to read the same reports and look Laura straight in the eye and say, "You know, they are paid to be pessimists. This really isn't bad news at all. You're going to beat this thing." And sometimes, I meant it. Sometimes, I believed it myself. But, a lot of the time, I knew she was losing the battle, and I still chose to tell her she was winning. I don't regret those lies at all.

But, I wish I'd stayed that night. Or, I wish I'd just said, "I want to go to my writer's group, then I'm going to eat, then go home. " But instead I acted on my own hidden agenda, ashamed that I had something I wanted to do that evening more than I wanted to spend time with her.

I know, intellectually, that no matter what I did or said that night, Laura still would not be here to share this Valentine's Day with me. But, on a deeper level, I really wonder if I could have changed things, if I'd stuck around and held her hand through that night, and told her everything would be okay, if maybe she would have pulled through, probably not this long, but maybe a few more days, a week or two more, a month. I'm told that she got very frightened that night, that as her vital signs started to decline she was scared, asking if there was hope. I wished I'd been there to tell her yes--even if there wasn't. I wish my last lie to her had been one I could be proud of.