Aflame

Yesterday I kicked off the morning with a mammogram. It was better than eating a live frog, for sure, though I have to say that the day improved from there. Breast cancer is not a thing that keeps me up at night, but it was the second time in ten days that I had paid someone to assess the possibility that a tumor might be snaking its tentacles through my body. Afterward I walked to the office through the autumn leaves, thinking about mortality.

I always think about dying in the fall. I probably post about death more than your average blogger-in-good-health -- there was this post in the fall of 2005, and another one five years later -- but I think about dying every November, whether or not those thoughts surface in a post. It's been on my mind more than usual this year.

Last week I went in for my annual skin check. I have the right amount of melanin for a person living at the 55th parallel, where my g'g'g'g'g'g'g'g'great-grandmothers lived out their lives, but I spent the first half of my childhood at the 30th. This was in the 70s, when sunblock was widely regarded as an affectation that prevented a person from attaining a healthy bronzed glow. I have had multiple blistering sunburns, and no amount of SPFing in the present will undo that history. So every year I haul myself into the dermatologist's office.

I was sitting on the table as she checked out my face, my thoughts far away. I wasn't expecting her to say anything about my face, because I look at my face every day. My back, maybe. Or my legs-- I can't see them clearly in the shower, with my glasses off, and it's no longer shorts season so they're mostly covered up the rest of the time. But she stopped suddenly, and handed me a lighted magnifying mirror. "Is this a new bump?" she wanted to know.

I frowned. I did not actually recognize that bump, despite the fact that it had taken up residence on my own personal face. "Would it be all right if we biopsied that bump?" the dermatologist asked. Yes indeed, I replied, thinking of a Twitter acquaintance recently diagnosed with metastatic melanoma. Biopsy anything you want to biopsy.

There was a release form, and a stinging injection of lidocaine, and murmured instructions to the assistant. "Left-side goma," I heard her say, and I wanted to whip my head around and demand more information. "Goma?!"I wanted to wail. "What's a GOMA? How can I not know what a GOMA is if I taught anatomy of the face to college students?" I did not whip my head around and demand more information, and a second later the syllables rearranged themselves in my brain: left zygoma.

It is a little weird how much better I feel about life challenges when I can spell them correctly.

The smell of burning hit my nose as she cauterized the biopsy site. Bandage, instructions, handshake-- off she went. I headed into the October sunshine, feeling wobbly and uncertain. Rational Jamie was trying to jolly Wobbly Uncertain Jamie into a better state of mind. Basal cell carcinoma is annoying but not a big deal, she said. This will be fine either way, she said. Wobbly Uncertain Jamie remained wobbly and uncertain, not willing to become a person with a cancer diagnosis of any stripe.

I got the biopsy results back earlier this week. Negative, thankfully.

The older you get, the more people you know whose biopsies and mammograms were not reassuring. The farther you travel through this life, the clearer it becomes that alive is a temporary state. I scuffed through fallen leaves on a perfect autumn morning, thinking again about the trees. Somehow they perceive the dying of the year, as days shorten and temperatures fall, and they respond not with a defeated slump but with a blaze of glory, russet and gold and impossible crimson. 

My route from the hospital took me up a street I don't usually travel and there I saw a baby tree, shorter than I am. It was dwarfed by its neighbors but it shone out more brightly than any of them, its leaves a stunning scarlet.

"That's what I want to be," I said to the Lord, not for the first time. "Let your glory and your beauty shine through me. Turn my awareness of my mortality into something lovely. Set me ablaze with the fire that does not consume."