Remembering
In September, “dancin’ in September … never was a cloudy day.” — Earth, Wind & Fire
September has always felt like a month that remembers.
Maybe it is the music. Maybe it is the changing light. Summer has not quite surrendered, yet autumn has already begun making its presence known. Warm afternoons linger; evenings invite us outside; music drifts from somewhere; people move through the ordinary rituals of their lives.
On one of those days, I walk along a lakeside trail.
The water catches the light. I hear people somewhere ahead of me, mixed with the quieter sounds of water along the shoreline. The air is mild enough that I barely notice it. I keep walking.
A child is playing.
Farther along, an adolescent bounces through the world with headphones on, occasionally singing along to whatever is playing in a world I cannot hear.
Inside a café, a young adult stands in front of a community corkboard crowded with announcements. Something catches their attention. They pause, raise a smartphone, take a photograph, and move on.
Near the water, someone is preparing a speedboat. Before long, the boat is moving across the lake.
I don’t know any of these people.
I don’t know where the child will be tomorrow, what song is playing through those headphones, what the young adult photographed, or where the person in the boat is going.
For a moment, our lives occupy the same landscape.
Nothing remarkable happens.
And perhaps that makes the moment remarkable.
Later, I sit with a drink and look across the water. The boat has traveled farther out, growing smaller as it moves toward the bright setting sun.
I think about the day and how unexpectedly good it has felt simply to be here.
Then I noticed the trees.
Only a week ago, the leaves seemed to hold every variation of deep green. Now reds, yellows, and oranges mix among them. Brown has appeared. Even gray.
I hadn’t noticed the colors changing.
Yet they had.
Maybe change often happens that way — not always at the moment we notice it, but quietly, while we focus on living.
A week can change the colors of a landscape.
A few months can change the landscape of a body.
On another walk, I noticed the chill first.
I have never had much trouble staying warm, but lately the cold seems to find me differently. I pull my jacket closer and keep walking.
My reflection catches me in the café’s large window.
I stop.
I have lost a significant amount of weight.
More than I realized.
What a difference a few months can make.
Other things, too. Nosebleeds that arrive without invitation — during a meeting, while eating, after waking, sometimes while doing nothing at all. Sometimes, it feels almost like a runny nose until I realize it is blood.
There are explanations, of course.
There are almost always explanations.
Medication, perhaps. A side effect. Something temporary.
So I continue with the ordinary activities of living.
But once we notice something, can we ever completely return to the moment before we noticed it?
Eventually, noticing becomes questioning.
Questions become appointments. Appointments become tests. They draw blood. Numbers appear on pages and screens. Words that once belonged to other people’s conversations enter mine.
Then comes the bone marrow biopsy.
And waiting.
There is a peculiar geography to waiting for medical answers. You are no longer standing where you were, but you have arrived nowhere else. Information is everywhere, yet you don’t have the one piece you want.
How did I get here?
This place is called Limbo.
The waiting acquires a name.
Cancer.
Leukemia.
The word doesn’t stop ordinary life. It enters it.
Soon you'll have unfamiliar words to learn, new questions to ask, appointments to keep, and medications to remember. Things once unfamiliar become routine simply through repetition.
Then —
PING.
Reminder: You have an appointment at 8095 Van Ness Avenue, 2nd Floor, ITA, SF, CA, September 15 at 10:00. Please confirm ©, reschedule (R), or cancel (X).
C.
I need to remember my medication journal.
Is the appointment tomorrow?
Or two days from now?
I check.
When appointments become frequent enough, time develops a strange elasticity. We track days by what must happen before the next appointment, what to bring, which medication is on schedule, and which question remains to be asked.
And somewhere in all of that, something unexpected happens.
Cancer becomes part of the ordinary course of living, too.
The treatment room has six chairs arranged in an oval — four occupied.
We range in age from our early twenties to much older, four people who would probably never have met anywhere else. Yet here we are, receiving treatment for leukemia in the same room.
We talk.
One woman is in her third round of treatment. Her husband has recently finished treatment for prostate cancer. He loves boating on the lake.
The lake.
For an instant, I see the speedboat again, growing smaller against the setting sun.
I don’t know her husband. But now boating carries another story with it.
Then the room's rhythm changes.
A young man arrives unexpectedly. He is nineteen and has lymphoma. Not long ago, he had finished treatment and rung the bell. He had been celebrating his high school graduation when cancer abruptly interrupted the celebration.
The nursing staff moves quickly.
They don’t place him in one of our chairs. They take him into one of the nearby rooms with a hospital bed and work to stabilize him.
We remain where we are.
Four people are receiving treatment.
But the room is no longer the same.
We listen without trying to listen. We notice movement. We watch faces. We wait for pieces of information.
Something is happening to someone most of us had never met.
And somehow, what is happening to him changes what is happening among us.
For a little while, six chairs and four strangers become something else.
Not quite friends.
Not quite family.
But no longer strangers, either.
Cancer does that sometimes. It creates communities nobody volunteered to join.
And within them, we notice lives we might otherwise have passed without ever noticing.
But awareness has limits.
Years later, I met an eleven-year-old boy traveling with his parents to a World Cup game in Texas.
We talked and laughed for perhaps fifteen minutes.
At some point, he noticed my port.
He looked at it and gave me a slight shake of his head, almost a question.
No?
I answered with a small gesture of my own.
Yes.
He grinned.
Recognition passed between us, needing very few words.
Get Misha Hawk-Wyatt’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
I know what it means to have a port.
I know something about being a person with cancer.
But I don’t know what it means to be eleven years old with cancer.
I don’t know what it means to be his parents.
Fifteen minutes of recognition does not give me the rest of their story.
Sometimes awareness begins by recognizing that we don’t know.
Other times, someone helps us know more.
Three years after her last ovarian cancer treatment, I met a young woman I remember well. She was training her Havanese, Mickie, to spend time with cancer patients.
Mickie could entirely redirect a serious conversation.
His Frisbee was a Starbucks coffee lid.
He would retrieve it, occasionally bring it to me, drop it nearby, and wag his tail as though I should understand perfectly well what came next.
Sometimes he made me laugh.
Sometimes, unexpectedly, he made me cry.
Mickie’s mom did something else.
She shared what she knew.
It seemed she knew about support options for cancer patients that I had never discovered — where to seek help, important questions to ask, and possibilities I hadn’t realized. Her wide-ranging knowledge amazed me.
Information moved from one person to another in an ordinary conversation.
So did comfort.
So did possibility.
And I began to understand awareness differently.
It wasn’t only what I noticed.
It was also what someone else noticed and shared with me.
September has another song.
In “September Song,” written by Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson and sung by Frank Sinatra, we are reminded that “the days dwindle down to a precious few.”
Precious.
Few.
By now, time has been moving through these stories.
A week for leaves to change.
A few months for a body to change.
Fifteen minutes with a boy and his parents.
Three years since a young woman’s last treatment.
Appointments measured in days.
Treatment measured in rounds.
A graduation celebration disrupted in the afternoon.
We talk about mortality when we talk about cancer. But cancer does not make us mortal.
It makes mortality harder to ignore.
The child at the lake has finite time.
So does the adolescent singing beneath the headphones.
So does the young adult using their smartphone.
So does the person steering the boat.
So do I.
Cancer can change our relationship with time, but living does not wait for cancer to end.
People live during treatment.
They live after treatment.
They live in remission.
They live with chronic disease.
And they live while facing terminal disease.
The operative word is live.
Which brings me back to awareness.
September calls attention to childhood cancers, leukemia and lymphoma, gynecologic cancers — including ovarian cancer — prostate cancer, thyroid cancer, and the people whose lives are touched by them.
But what does awareness mean?
Recognition?
Knowledge?
Understanding?
Attention?
Maybe awareness begins with noticing.
The child.
The music.
A photograph.
A boat.
A changing leaf.
A changing body.
A stranger in a treatment room.
A port.
A dog with a coffee lid.
A piece of information someone thought worth sharing.
But then what?
I am aware.
Now what?
There isn’t one answer.
It might mean asking a question we have been afraid to ask. Seeking help. Sharing a resource. Making an appointment. Learning something we didn’t know.
It might mean calling someone.
Listening without trying to fix anything.
Sharing a new book by an author you both enjoy.
Sending a song.
Leaving a hand-drawn smile on a colleague’s desk.
Volunteering.
Giving.
Changing something in an organization that makes it easier for another person to find care, information, dignity, or belonging.
Or simply sitting with what we have learned long enough for it to change what we notice next.
Awareness doesn’t give us someone else’s story.
It allows us to notice that a story exists.
And perhaps to decide what, if anything, we will do because we noticed.
I return to the lake.
Maybe the child is still playing.
Maybe the adolescent’s song has changed.
Someone else may be standing before the café corkboard.
The boat may have already returned to shore.
The leaves will continue changing whether I notice them or not.
Ordinary life continues.
And somewhere, Earth, Wind & Fire is still asking us to remember.
Ba-dee-ya. Dee-ya, dee-ya.
September.
The operative word is awareness.
