Yesterday I read Life on the Refrigerator Door by Alice Kuipers. This is less a novel than a fictional collection of notes between an adolescent daughter and her hard-working mother, left on the fridge door as their most dependable means of communication. When Claire’s mom discovers a lump in her breast, the notes become a mixture of the mundane (the grocery lists and reminders about the rabbit’s cage needing cleaning) and the crucial (doctor appointments, survivor meetings, “why is this happening?”).
Kuipers is very good at conveying to us in these just short notes the temperament and personality of the two main characters, their relationship with each other, and their situations with Claire’s father, Mom’s friends, and Claire’s friends. When illness hits out of the blue, we see the catalyst effect it has, ripping down the middle of their lives and leaving each of them more firmly separated than before. We read as they move back towards each other, but time is running out.
This is a fine little piece, well-wrought and certainly moving. But it is another writing (novel, short story, poem, screen play, song) in a long line of writings about cancer. Another one that catches that moment of first suspecting and then diagnosing and then attempting to fight. Of course, this is the compelling story of cancer, the horror of discovery, the fury of battle, the decisiveness of defeat (no matter who wins, cancer or patient).
But that is not the full story of cancer. The months of illness, of doctors’ appointments and treatments, and visits to the emergency room where cancer is never treated as an emergency, those are months you cannot forget, much as you want to. But the full story, the real complete story of what happens when cancer happens, begins with the years and years you had before the illness came. The years when you took it all for granted, the person, her life, her eternal physical presence in your life. And the rest of the story, the part after the illness, is the really long part. That is what happens after the illness, when cancer kills that person you had around you for so long and now that person is gone but you forget. You still think of calling her — “I’ve got to tell her what happened today” — or of letting her know something — “I did leave the keys under the flower pot”. That impulse to call someone you always used to call doesn’t go away for a long time. Even when you realize it’s really true, she really is dead, you still want to call. And then you start praying that she will appear in a dream, because then you get to see her again, whole and hearty and alive, right before your eyes as long you can stay asleep. Then the years go by and losing her does not get any easier: the pain changes but not to an easier form, just to a more silent form, a slyer version that knows just how to hide and then pounce, appearing suddenly and with a slice right through your heart, all over again.
Cancer is a big theme in too many stories but always within the time limits of the illness, and rarely in the years before and the years beyond. I would have liked to read a note from Claire to her own daughter in thirty years time, a note that showed she had learned the lesson of living in the moment, of appreciating who is around her now because they will not always be there. A hard lesson for an adolescent, a hard lesson for any of us.
