How to go on?

The newly diagnosed often get caught up in the why of it all. Why me? I wasn’t under any illusion that the universe works in anyone’s favor, so mine was more of a how problem. In the past, I’d muscled through challenges by sheer force of will, but my reserve of will power was utterly depleted.

In addition to my health crises, I was bogged down with another quagmire. My husband and I were on our third attempt at mediation. Why had our marriage ended after two decades? The math would not hold. Our grievance list outnumbered our gratitude list, and we couldn’t reverse the equation. Math wasn’t either of our strong suits. Our first two attempts to finalize things had gone off the rails for every reason imaginable. Mainly, worried over the financial fall out of divorce, I’d hoped to remain separated but not divorce.

We’d launched the third round when Covid hit. Our mediation moved to Zoom. Then, came the diagnosis.

“How are you doing?” the mediator would ask at the top of our scheduled sessions.

“How do you think I’m doing? I have stage four cancer!” I didn’t have it in me to observe the niceties of social interactions. After sobbing my way through a couple of sessions, I suggested we hit pause. My husband wanted to press on. We’d negotiated almost all of the points of contention, but I couldn’t sign off on anything in this state. My heightened anxiety had paralyzed my decision-making capabilities. I had cancer and was getting divorced?

It was at this moment that two friends stepped back into my life after a long absence.

Jill, Sarah, and I met in 1990. We were all recent transplants from Manhattan, pursuing careers in the entertainment business in Los Angeles. Sarah, ten years younger than Jill and me, was an actress and writer and recent college grad. Jill had been a dancer with a prestigious modern dance company. We and eight others formed a theater collective that met every Tuesday night for two years in a rundown rehearsal space in Hollywood. All of us were the first in our friend groups to move across country, and like expats who didn’t speak the native language, we clung to each other like life rafts.

As we found employment and established other connections, we disbanded, but we kept in intermittent touch. Jill and I had children at the same time. As babies, they were inseparable until they went to different schools and we drifted apart. When Sarah gave birth to twins ten years later, she was sidelined by a bacterial infection. Jill and I stopped in for a visit. While Sarah napped, Jill and I folded laundry.

“We won’t be seeing her for a while,” Jill said, after we’d said our goodbyes.

It took fifteen years and my cancer diagnosis to get the three of us together again.

After we reconnected and picked up right where we’d left off. Theater people are like that; we form tribal bonds. We began gathering in my backyard on Sundays, every two to three weeks, for tea and sympathy, and a little badminton thrown in to boot. Jill and Sarah brought their dogs, Cotton and Chunk, to play together as the local parks were closed at that time. We weren’t in contact between Sundays, we weren’t that kind of confidents. Like church ladies at a reception after services. Only, without the church.

We were ahead of the trend of setting regularly scheduled friendship dates. In recent years, this approach to building closeness has been highlighted in a slew of articles. Researchers compare its effectiveness to the way that an exercise routine takes hold only through consistent calendaring. In a New York Times essay titled “The Secret to Keeping Strong Friendships Is in Your Calendar,” Stefano Montali traces this to a German tradition of Stammtisch, or a “regulars table,” where bars reserve a table for familiar faces to gather and socialize.

One Sunday, I was awaiting the creak of the backyard gate announcing their arrivals, when that now-familiar wave of fatigue hit. I lay face down on the grass and listened to the singing of the spotted towhees that make their home in my sprawling maple. I’ve read this kind of thing has become popular; practitioners call it “grounding” or “earthing,” but I was simply stretching out on a patch of grass.

Jill showed up first and, without a word, dropped the bag of lemons she’d brought over, and joined me on the ground. Then, Sarah showed up and followed suit. Over tea, we laughed about how neither had asked, “What are we doing?” or “How long are we going to be here?” “What’s next? Ritualistic purification rites? Animal sacrifice?” They’d simply joined in.

As we said our goodbyes, I said, “You know what we should do—”

“Yes!” Sarah said before I’d even finished the sentence.

“You don’t even know I was going to say.”

“Annabelle, you had me at we should.”

That’s how I’ll go on, I thought.

In comedy improv, there’s a golden rule: say “yes, and.” If you can’t agree on what scene you’re in, the action can’t move forward. You’re about to announce that you’re a dentist preparing to launch into ye ole maniacal madman with a drill routine, but your scene partner has just brandished a gladius and scutum. If you don’t you join this gladiator in the Colosseum, all momentum is going to grind to a halt. In life, it’s much harder. I’ve rarely said yes to anything without intense deliberation.

Sarah’s willingness had a certain ease. Would ease ever be possible again? Was Jill’s giving into gravity a model for giving into the gravity of my situation? It jogged a memory of something Mel Gottlieb, a former therapist, often repeated. Mel was an adherent of the early twentieth-century Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank, a contemporary of Freud. Rank described something he called “the volitional affirmation of the obligatory.” In essence, fighting the reality of your circumstance creates tension. Instead of going kicking and screaming, why not go with the flow? The “volitional” part is key; it’s the acknowledgement that acceptance is a choice. The affirmation is an act of will.

The first opportunity to put this to the test came almost immediately, in the form of another message asking to continue the mediation. I said yes, even though I wanted to say no. No one got everything they wanted and compromises were made, like every divorce settlement in the history of the world.

I don’t recommend a Zoom divorce. An online ending grants you the opportunity to observe your partnership’s devolution in two-dimensional starkness: bodies that once shared space and time, partitioned into distinctly demarcated territories—boxes—not unlike how your respective belongings have been divided. You and the person you could recognize by scent alone are now suspended in an antiseptic ether, just to reinforce the reality that what you once considered foundational has etherealized. One, or both of you, will freeze, reliably, into an impenetrable version of yourself, trapped in time, preserved in cyber-amber. Take a screenshot. It will serve as a twenty-first-century fossilized record of your marriage’s end that you can later revisit. That is, if you can remember where you saved the recording, which you won’t. And when your internet goes down mid-session, which it will, “connection lost” will appear on your screen, as if you weren’t already aware of that.

As much as the divorce dismantled one of my foundational relationships, the Sunday Friends Stammtisch added a kind of scaffolding to my life. The regularity providing support and cementing our bond. Since we began meeting up regularly, we keep a text chain to check in on each other. We send poems and favorite passages from books we’re reading. If someone is going through a really rough patch, we’ll send that universal cure-all: GIFs of interspecies love: a racoon riding an alligator, a gorilla cradling a kitten, a cat cuddling with a mouse, a capybara riding an alligator. We’re those ride or die friends, even though that’s a terrible phrase you don’t want to contemplate too deeply.

Because the moral arc of the universe bends toward irony, the inspiration for “You had me at we should” didn’t pan out as expected. I’d meant to suggest that day in my backyard that Sarah, Jill, and I take a friend up on a generous offer to spend a restive weekend at his mountain retreat on the edge of the San Bernardino National Forest. It took some wrangling, but we pulled it off. Sort of. Jill and I spent two lazy days sleeping late, reading, and hiking. But Sarah, with her younger kids still living at home, had last-minute parental responsibilities that prevented her from joining us.

“Whatever you do with this time in your life, be sure to make a mess of it,” Claudette, a longtime role model who is a bit my senior, advised me when I told her about my newfound approach.

That Sarah hadn’t made it to the retreat seemed a perfect expression of this messy, imperfect way forward.