WHAT HAPPENED?
Joyce Dehli
“What happened?”
That’s what Julianna asked me. She was coming down the alley,
swinging her backpack and looking all caught up in some sixth-grader daydream until, boom, she saw me. She froze, and I think I did, too. She raised a hand against the sun’s glare. It was coming at us sideways, the angle too harsh too soon for a September afternoon. She squinted hard. She’s the perfect neighbor kid, always polite, always happy to see me, but now her eyes were wide. They settled on my chemo beanie.
“What happened?” she asked. They were the first words out of her mouth.
How was I supposed to reply? I had the same question and no good answer. In a breath’s time, a photograph rose in my mind: me at Julianna’s age in beige pedal-pushers and knee-highs, saddle shoes, and a red-and-blue striped top, posed beside a modest evergreen on my family’s front lawn, swinging a badminton racket, pretending happiness, the other hand shielding my eyes from sun or scrutiny, eyes that revealed nothing because by then the real me was buried too deep for anyone to see. Julianna’s eyes brimmed with curiosity and concern. She had such a glow – her deep brown face wrapped by curls, bronze in that sun and longer than I remembered. I hadn’t seen her in a while.
Cancer happened. I told Julianna that truth, then spun cotton candy all around it. I smiled big and said I’d be fine in time. I can’t remember for sure, but I probably joked about my lame hat and laughed, though she didn’t. I drooped against my car, relieved to be home after hours of chemo and immunotherapy. My face was pale and puffy from steroids. Julianna didn’t say another word until she skipped to her back gate, turned to wave goodbye, and smiled at me.
“I hope you feel better,” she said. And in that moment, I did.
Was it okay – what I said? The mix of truth and lies. What’s too much for kids to take in? Or for any of us? For me?
It’s been weeks since I saw Julianna, but I keep thinking about her question. What happened?
Why did cancer, after fourteen years sound asleep, rise up ready to kill me? Good question, but it’s not what I mean by “what hap-pened?” It’s true, everybody thought the cancer was long gone. I’d done so much: the breast cut off, twenty-two lymph nodes, too, and my ovaries removed, the rest of me ravaged by the “red devil” and two more high-dose chemo drugs. I swallowed an anti-cancer pill every morning for ten years though it left my joints wailing. Giving up alcohol wasn’t too hard, surprisingly. Same for meat, maybe be-cause I continued to eat fish. Going organic was easy, and pumping up my exercise felt good. Sleeping enough? I tried. Maybe it all worked for a while. Or maybe cancer laughed it off, kept its own clock. You’ll never know, doctors told me.
With that, and no inherited genetic mutations, it also seems point-less to ask: why me?
It should have been caught sooner, that’s true. It wasn’t my fault. I kept all my appointments, did all my scans, reported new pains – like the pain around my sternum several months ago. I thought the bone seemed to be sticking out more. I’d peer into a mirror at my pale chest, press tremulous fingers into the bone. Was I imagining a bump? That’s what my oncologist’s nurse practitioner said. For five months, she dismissed my concern. Blamed it on “post-mastectomy pain syndrome.” Ordered a worthless scan and said I didn’t need another.
“Why are you spiraling down into fear?” she asked. Her impatience was plain.
Thank God for my regular doctor. When blood tests for my annual exam showed slightly high liver enzymes, she ordered an ultrasound. At home at my desk, I clicked on the results in my patient portal. Tumors, it said. Everywhere in my liver. Likely metastatic. I nearly vomited. I nearly passed out. More scans and their results followed: a big tumor at my sternum, in my pectoralis muscle, on an adrenal gland, and in various lymph nodes. Diagnosis: metastatic breast cancer, widespread and incurable.
What happened? How could the cancer have spread so far with-out being detected? Good question, but pursuing it would consume more energy than I could spare. I needed to focus on weekly treatments, blood tests, scans, appointments with a new oncologist and with outside doctors for second opinions. Anything to stay alive.
Still, when my head sank into the pillow at night, all sorts of questions clamored for attention. Why did my original cancer morph from a fairly treatable type into a more lethal version, resistant to almost all available treatments? It’s a fascinating question – for someone with emotional distance. It happens in only about ten percent of recurrent breast cancer cases, and nobody is sure why. Call it bad luck and leave it at that. That’s what I decided.
Doctors say I could die within months, a year, maybe two or three or more if I’m incredibly lucky. Twelve percent of patients with my type of breast cancer, called metastatic triple-negative, live five years. Zero percent live ten years. That’s what studies say. Too harsh. Too soon. I think: who knows for sure? I could be an outlier, a miracle. By definition, it’s unlikely. I can’t count on anything. None of us can, except for a life, a death, and a whole lot of surprises in between – and now, for me, a flood of memories. One memory is so familiar, so old and essential, that to be immersed in it feels like a homecoming. Or the promise of a homecoming.
The memory arises most days and I’m always entranced: I’m prob-ably five, with shining eyes, on the swing in my family’s backyard, pumping my legs and pulling side chains, rising and falling, inhaling the same air that tingles my skin, singing songs my mother taught me, unaware of time, alone and not alone, and held by an enveloping sky.
It leaves me longing for something I struggle to define. I’ll try. It’s to exist simultaneously in two realms – within my distinct body and within an infinite wholeness beyond my body and beyond my comprehension. To belong to wholeness, to be wholeness and aware of it.
I can’t think myself into that experience, can’t even fully imagine it. Still, I have the swing memory. Even then, I sense that memory is a conduit to an even older experience, nothing I can grasp. The swing memory is like an echo, reverberating from an originating sound.
There have been many echoes across my life, but none as indelible as that on the swing.
If I was once distinct and seamlessly immersed in a larger wholeness, where did that wholeness go?
What happened?
In my memory, I lived and loved exuberantly through the age of five or maybe six. I don’t remember wondering if I belonged to my family or our God then; I felt part of everything. But soon enough, the cycles of injury and repair began. Just like in any life. I vacillated between feeling apart from and a part of everything – six decades of that. Mostly, I experienced myself as an individual, all parts – mind, emotions, flesh, nerves, and bone – contained in my body. Always, though, there were suggestions – those echoes – of more.
These days, I’m attuned to the echoes. I long to trust that the source of wholeness is just beyond me but within reach before I die. And when I die.
“We are forever driven to become conscious of a wholeness from which consciousness exiles us,” Christian Wiman wrote in Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair. He’s right, I think. That’s what it means to be human, the source of our experiences of beauty, suffering and joy; our storytelling and making of art, our making of religions and philosophies, our fears of dying as we are – with a longing for wholeness that may not be wholly satisfied even for those who experience moments of communion, the echoes.
When I die what will happen to my memories, desires, questions, fears, impulses, dreams, my love so palpable and big? What will hap-pen to the energy always humming, always propelling me? To the unseen me, what I long felt certain defined me? When my body dies, where does invisible me go? I don’t know. I’ll never know. I don’t believe in anything because belief implies a certainty. Instead, I think, I feel, I intuit, I sense; they allow room for the doubt and uncertainty inherent in me. Still, I envy those who are certain of an awaiting God or certain that their favorite scientific theorem is airtight and always will be. It must bring them solace at difficult times.
I want solace.
I’ve been thinking about grace.
* * *
These days, I awake early, between four and five, kiss Nicki lightly and leave her sleeping, quiet as I can, carrying three notebooks, my laptop, and an armload of books down the stairs to the living room sofa. My cat Ernie often follows. I make coffee and settle among five big pillows, a blue one on my lap to support the notebook and books
I take up, turning from one to another as intuition leads me. I reach for the side-table lamp, click one, two, three, but it’s still not bright enough to illuminate what I need. I need a lamp to guide my descent inside – I say inside but don’t know what that means. Is the wisdom I need embedded in my tissues and bone, my beating heart, my brain? If that were so, why read? Why close my eyes and listen to violins, piano, and cello? Why love?
From morning darkness to sunrise, I read poets, philosophers, mystics, scientists, journalists, doctors, and the stories of people who care for the dying. Many say it’s important to see ourselves clearly, without delusion or judgment, and to know that what we see is not all we are. We are not only what is contained within the body. We are also what passes between and among us: ideas both noble and abhorrent, love that invigorates and hate that diminishes, art more acutely real than life itself. Life itself. The whole mess, glorious and devastating.
I write. I sit silently, eyes closed, and imagine my mind descending to my heart, the two melding. I focus all attention there. Listen hard and patiently, but nothing arises. I want grace. I always have.
* * *
A childhood friend texted me after learning about my recent diagnosis. It was a kind note but burdensome, too, in its plea for me to call, fill him in, and, as always with him, reminisce about happier days. His last sentence struck me as especially odd: “I should have made the effort to get to know you better.” Like my life is already over? Too late now? Yet, he put into words something that I’d been thinking, too. I should have made the effort to know me better.
He is several years older than me. Our families were close. We haven’t seen each other for at least twenty years, yet he says he’s always felt close to me. I don’t know why. He’s a decent man, a good man, who is now old with an ailing wife, a son and daughter, and grandchildren. The last time he called, about a year ago, he talked endlessly about the old days, the fun we and our friends had in our basement playrooms and backyards and how good he felt then, in a way he hasn’t since. I didn’t respond to his text. Even from nine hundred miles away, I recoil at his need for an intimacy that exists only in his childhood memories. It scares him that I’ll die – someone who knew him when he loved his life. I don’t know him now. Not any more than he knows me. But he’s right, something still binds us.
Only one memory of him stands out, and I was twenty then, not a child. We were at another friend’s wedding reception, a huge Catholic affair with a band and free booze. When I took a break from dancing, I saw him alone, slumped on a hallway bench. We chatted, catching up on each other’s lives. He was married by then and I’d recently broken up with my boyfriend. I’d had a couple of drinks, but wasn’t drunk, so I can’t believe I told him that what I missed most was the sex. We never, ever talked about sex in my family and certainly not with family friends. What possessed me to tell him that truth? And what possessed him to reply that, for him, sex had been a great disappointment? His eyes didn’t hide his bafflement or sadness. What did I say? I recall only that I left him alone on the bench and hurried back to the dance floor where music and cheering drowned everything else out. It’s nothing we’ve talked about since, and I wouldn’t bring it up now.
* * *
What I feared for fourteen years happened. Toward the end of those years, my doctors predicted I’d be among the lucky ones whose cancer never comes back. My confidence grew. I felt lucky, though I never shed my fear. It spiked during annual scans and when any ailment, however temporary, appeared. Funny, though, I wasn’t much worried about cancer when I had the liver ultrasound. But from that day on, I knew I was walking around with a body full of cancer. The week before – same body, same cancer – I didn’t know. After the scan, my mind detached from my imperiled body. My mind wanted to live. Nothing seemed real, and yet people were crying, hugging, calling doctors, bringing food. I was calling, hugging, sometimes crying, sometimes floating in another realm, not safe there either, but afloat.
In the next fourteen weeks, I had seventeen scans – CT scans, ultrasounds, nuclear whole-body bone scans, x-rays, and microscopic analyses of tumor tissue and cells in my blood. Where is cancer inside my body? That’s what doctors want to see. So, scan me. But I want to know something more. Is it me in there? I download and enlarge the images of my organs and bones, brightening my screen to peer at the empty spaces, the mystery. It’s not cancer that most interests me. I already know it’s there.
* * *
A lanky skeleton perches on my neighbor’s window ledge. Down the street, another skeleton lounges in a pile of leaves, marked by a plastic headstone that says RIP. It’s nearly Halloween. Corpses are everywhere.
A much older skeleton made yesterday’s news. It belonged to an infant boy, born 17,000 years ago. His nearly pristine remains were found beneath rock in an Italian cave. Radiocarbon dating placed his brief life in the Ice Age. DNA analysis revealed his eyes were blue, his hair dark and curly, and his heart afflicted with an inherited disease.
He died before age two. Did the blue-eyed boy ever feel joy? Was he afraid as he died? His DNA didn’t say.
My own skeleton was scanned twice in those first fourteen weeks. A radioactive tracer was injected into my jugular vein and sent off to roam my body for three hours in search of cancer. The tracer clusters in spots where bone is changing rapidly, not only from cancer but also from arthritis and injuries. Those spots shine black on images snapped by a gamma scanner. My sternum lit up black on every scan. I wanted that tumor to shrink, as had those in my chest and liver. Later, though, my doctor told me nuclear bone scans can’t distinguish between disease and bone rebuilding itself in cancer’s after-math. Black spots can signify death or healing. The scan can’t tell you which. You just can’t see.
I keep looking at images of my skeleton, at the spaces between and around my bones. With no tissue or skin or border to see, everything outside appears part of me.
During one bone scan, the technician told me to settle in for a thirty-minute nap. He was at least half my age, tall and slender, and moved like a dancer, controlled and graceful. He talked softly, with an accent I thought might be Caribbean. After the scan, he held my arm to guide me down. I’d been so still, he was sure I had a good sleep. I hadn’t. I’d been meditating, as I always do while being scanned. Usually, it’s rounds of silent wishes for me and others to feel ease, be free from suffering, be healthy and happy, and feel loved. I end with wishes for all beings, then start the round again. It calms me as saying the rosary in childhood never did, my thumb and forefinger pinching glass beads, a prayer for each, one after another. Maybe I did it wrong. Maybe I was too deep inside myself. Out of God’s reach.
Standing again in the scanning room, I felt worn out and afraid. It was time to hurry home. I pulled on my chemo beanie, grabbed my jacket and backpack, and, walking away, turned to thank the technician. Wait, he said, you’ll want to button up. My shirt was askew, with the top open enough to reveal the port where the tracer had entered my vein. My hands were full.
May I? he asked.
I agreed, and he deftly did the top button, smiled, and sent me on my way. Such kindness likely was routine for him. He wanted patients to leave with their dignity. Perhaps he thought nothing of it, but the memory of his tenderness echoes across my days – the tenderness of a stranger.
MRIs and CT scans of my brain terrify me. If I – the one I call me – am located anywhere, isn’t it there, in my brain? A couple of months ago, I lost consciousness hours after a surgical biopsy. Looking for an explanation, doctors rushed to see if cancer was in my brain. I didn’t even try to meditate. Spasms of fear shook the gurney as a technician rolled me, headfirst, into a CT machine’s donut hole. “Thank you, God!” I exclaimed when the scan came back clean. Why? It was just good luck, not divine intervention. But there, barely covered by a hospital gown in a cold ER room, my gratitude was boundless and needed release. Nearly half of patients with metastatic triple-negative breast cancer get metastasis to the brain.
* * *
To look at me now – bald but for old-man white wisps, a body thickened from steroids and inactivity, a face wan where rashes haven’t spread, daily afflicted with bloody noses, a slow-walker now through Rock Creek Park, frequently pausing for deeper breaths – few would imagine the life I’ve lived. Inside me, I mean. My public life hasn’t been distinctive. I’m not one who stands out, and now it’s my chemo beanie, not me, that’s seen. There will be no headlines when I die, and that’s fine with me. And yet, I want it to be known, by at least a few, that I’ve loved being alive. I love it now more than ever. Every day I feel a hum vibrating through me, more constant than fear and deeper than need. Sometimes, I’d swear, it’s in the air.
And I like rubbing my baldish head, the fuzz that covers it, the feel of my hard skull, encasing whatever me is in there. My ninety-year-old mother visited recently, flying despite her fears. In the days before, an image popped into my mind a couple of times: I rested my baby-bald head on her lap and she caressed it, smiling and talking to me. I actually thought about it when she was sitting on the sofa beside me, but it felt too risky. I held my place.
The next day, I was driving in soft, late-morning sunlight up a major avenue, crowded with well-behaved cars and busses and pedestrians crossing at lights with kids in strollers and dogs on leashes, nobody yelling or beeping, and it seemed, in a rare D.C. moment, that we all moved to one underlying rhythm. A pattern both sensible and absurd. As I raised my foot off the brake, words came to my lips: “I don’t want to leave this world.”
Already, that memory is on auto-replay. It’s one among many. But don’t think I’m living in the past. My past lives in me. I am that child on the backyard swing, the girl posed beside the modest ever-green with secrets clutched inside, the one who skated on back-yard rinks and swam with sisters and friends in our above-ground pool. I am the one who read books to see possibilities beyond me, and who danced in blues bars, glitzy clubs, women-only dives, in church halls, and living rooms, anywhere that offered a beat and release.
I am she who nearly fainted with pleasure when first making love with a woman, a joyous start to a devastating romance. I am the one who biked hours in fields of sunflowers with a new girlfriend, stop-ping to make love under a churchyard tree. I am she for whom sex, with women and sometimes men, could satisfy a spiritual need that religion did not.
I am the aunt who gathered nieces and nephews to make up stories about a cow named Big Blue Bessie, and I am the one who, for far too long, reserved the word “love” for sweethearts and family until I mustered the courage to say I loved my friends beyond words. I am the one who longed to be buoyed by something larger than me when doctors’ odds offered little hope and I couldn’t find enough inside me to carry on. I am the one whose longing rose to find, in some shared space, love and kindness that enveloped me like a benevolent sky.
Dare I call it grace?
Must I be torn apart to become whole, again? I hear the echoes.
I am all of what once lived, and still lives, in me. And that’s not all.
You die alone, and you don’t.
* * *
It comes back to me now, the day I thought I heard God speak. I was twenty-six, living in a collective of social justice activists in Milwaukee, and I needed some personal space. A Catholic Worker couple offered a tiny cottage, somewhere upstate, for a weekend retreat – three nights for a donation of five dollars. I had little money then, but I had books and notepads. Snow piled up outside. I booted up and walked to a nearby town for groceries and beer. The cottage was so cold that I wore my down jacket and hat inside. On the second night, I stretched out on a well-worn sofa and covered myself with the two blankets I could find. Did I mention how lonely I was then? I had people around me, friends, a man I was dating, and a married woman who thought she loved me. I was lonely for something else. On that sofa, with one yellowed lamp giving light, I read Thomas Merton for a long time. I put the book down and snuggled deeper into the sofa to think. I looked out at the night sky, star-lit, and made a silent plea for relief. Within absolute silence, a roar erupted and echoed through the cottage. I bolted upright, panicked, and then thought, “God?” I did, seriously. When I realized it was the furnace kicking in, I laughed and laughed and cried. Such relief.
* * *
Don’t be a fool, my mind orders me. Be smart. Be calm. Do this right. You have only one chance. Don’t die a fool. Don’t be laughed at. But I know that voice is only one of many in me and isn’t the wisest by far. It seeks to contain what cannot be held, to preserve what isn’t even real, to save me from a fate it abhors, but it won’t save me.
After my recent diagnosis, I reconnected with my old therapist, who also was once my meditation teacher when I lived in Madison, Wisconsin. We meet on our screens. She’s promised to accompany me wherever and however this goes. I trust her. She tells me, “There is no limit to the inner spaciousness we can create.” I practice imagining that I am, inside, full of wide-open space, endless fields, sky, the black of night where stars burn and flicker, beacons, universes – all within me, bigger than cancer, and alive.
There is no end to what can be imagined.
I asked my therapist what she thinks of grace. I told her I’ve read much about grace at different times in my life, especially lately, but I felt sheepish saying so. The word feels so, well, religious, I explained. Yet there are many views, not all religious. She agreed. She, like others, sees grace as all-encompassing, not something bestowed but everywhere, unseen and largely ignored. I’m thinking about that, but thinking isn’t enough. Time might be short. Days pass, and I am too unfocused. I live as if I have all the time in the world. I go to appointments. Greet the neighbors. Read and write. At home, I go to a window at twilight when light swells before softening and seems to emanate from everything – the brick facades of neighbors’ houses, the gardens below, trees young and old, cars and roads, and people walking home.
The trees are not moving. Not one. Not at all. Where are the racing squirrels that make boughs bounce? Where are the birds whose wings move air and ruffle leaves? Why is the sky, and everything, so still? I hear nothing. What is happening? It scares me.
Joyce Dehli’s debut essay, “I Think You Need New Friends,” was published by Alaska Quarterly Review in 2022 and received a Notable Essay citation in Best American Essays 2023. Other essays have appeared in the 2025 Chatauqua anthology Saying It Plain: An American Patchwork; Aquifer: The Florida Review Online; and Hunger Mountain.