A City in Greece
By: Antoinette Nevitt
Tags: Feminism, Empathy, Exulansis, Poetry, Cancer

Trigger alert: The subject matter is of a woman coping with a terminal diagnosis in a highly competitive, mostly male work environment. If you or your loved ones have experienced this type of thing, this might be a hard poem to read.

i

Imagine you have breast cancer.

Or imagine you’re a guy when you are not.

You are teaching the monster course in your department

two decades into your career,

still at the first real job you’ve ever had,

doing the work you love.

Your personal discovery and claim

is understanding vision —

how we learn to see —

because seeing isn’t just what we are born with,

as it turns out.

You have been in remission

but now C’s come knocking you back,

the same big C that took your Mom,

but please don’t take my little girls.

Please give me time to see them grow

and all the cliché moments —

prom night, graduations, marriage,

babies and career, continuing the line.

Your university is an hour and a half commute

from home, your little girls and man

who love you like the wind loves the prairie

or the gulls love the shore.

But you feel tired, clumsy, failing and alone

as you drive away from Research road,

with All Things Considered blaring

out of the big valley to your seaside home.

ii

Funny that your colleagues do not seem to recognize it,

even though you have had to wear a wig at times.

Fear fuels success as well as the ramifications

that will never be undone if you survive.

I will always be pathetic in their eyes.

I will always have the shell of this disease

strapped to my back.

Your lab space will be taken,

or your students will be screwed,

like the young of the dying on Darwin’s day.

Will they die too?

iii

You dream they come like crows in the morning

to dine on the corpse of your career.

Don’t you know it, Golden Girl —

Your Brilliant Career

smeared like road kill on the pavement,

once a beautiful blooming beast,

now ripped to bits by colleagues,

eager for the gizzard and the heart.

This is Mother Nature’s Law, and dying,

you crouch face to face with Her without a break.



Can’t these guys see I’ve lost my hair? My puffy eyes?

Can’t they see that I can barely make it up the stairs?

When giving best is all you’ve ever wanted in return —

Why can’t I float outside this body

into that one over there?

iv

Instead of giving you the time to rest,

the Chair is nipping at your heels.

He gives you two hundred and fifty little minds,

while he relaxes into his elective

of twenty-five again.

Why do these guys never teach

when women retire ten years early,

with stress-related illness,

or leave, or die like you?

We all know that women rarely thrive

in this culture of misogyny,

until they learn

to be misogynistic too.

v

Now comes spring.

The final spring of life, exhausted,

and C is plucking those last buds,

popping them before they come to bloom.

You make it through the final

without punching in the grades yourself.

Surely, the Chair will understand?

“Hey, kid, you don’t look so good,” he’ll say,

“Give me your hand,

and let me help you up the stairs.”

But show weakness when it’s dog-eat-dog,

and you are out on your ass in this world.

And you have always been so proud,

graduating Stanford at twenty,

branding you a Ph.D. ahead of the pack,

landing a prestigious postdoc and a job,

making it work with your little girls and man

even with the long drive into the valley

every day and back again.

vi

You drift off and it’s three days later and you are in bed,

trying not to hurl into the sheets.

Did I turn in my grades?

But surely your colleagues will step up.

One of them will get in touch.

Somebody will back you up

as spring moves into summer.

“What do you mean, she’s sick?

She hasn’t said anything to me,” he says.

But who among that crew would notice?

They make their living strapping monkeys into chairs

and feeding them orange juice

while electrodes tap the output from their brains —

reducing life to a preparation in a skull

rather than a living soul.

Show weakness when it’s dog-eat-dog,

and you are out on your ass in this world.

Or does it even matter?

What has this job been to me?

An opportunity to help the young

and teach them what I know from nearly twenty years —

of how we learn to see?

vii

This will work out.

I will beat this for my kids.

I will survive for them.

A colleague will step in and understand.

viii

Then you get a letter in the mail,

a real letter, with a seal,

a letter like a friend would send

in the old days, before email —

a letter threatening dismissal?

You want me fired because I’m sick?

Trying not to hurl —

I will beat this for my kids!

This is the first message she receives from her department

of nearly twenty years,

reduced to a preparation in a skull

rather than a living soul,

as spring moves into summer.

Dear colleague,

(they forget, on top of the cancer,

on top of the agony of CANCER),

You could be fired after nineteen years

of service, tenure,

full professorship, a leader

to this university and the department

(that once together orbited your star)

because nobody in our community —

could see that I was dying of breast cancer?

And, trying not to hurl into the sheets —

Did I turn in my grades?

Show weakness when it’s dog-eat-dog,

and you are out on your ass in this world!

And you have always been so proud,

graduating Stanford at twenty,

and the long drive into the valley,

every day and back again.

ix

The darker side of tragedy is mystery

when it comes to other people’s lives,

especially for those clueless guys

who think that Empathy must be A City in Greece,

long ruined in a flood.

Better to look the other way and take it easy

when it comes to making sense

of someone else’s misery.

x

She drifts off and three days later she is in bed,

trying not to hurl.

“She hasn’t said anything to me,”

the Chair of her department shrugs,

jotting down a note to be in touch,

and better make a show of who she was,

after she’s gone.

While back at home, she holds her family close.

Who will love them like their Mom?

Please give me time to see them grow,

for all the cliché moments —

prom night, graduations, marriage —

babies and career, continuing the line,

even though she knows she’s dying,

she can’t help but see her future in their eyes,

because seeing isn’t just what we are born with,

as it turns out.