When you have cancer, every hour, day, week, month, and season is a collective countdown.
Hours until the day is done.
So the week is done.
So it’s one week closer to chemo week.
Until chemo is over.
Until I can prepare my body for surgery.
Until I can grow my hair back.
Until I recover from surgery.
Until I start radiation.
Until I start my hormone therapy.
Until I finish my hormone therapy.
Until I can ring all the bells.
Until I get my last surgery, the removal of this fucking port-a-cath.
Until it’s all over.
Week to chemo.
Month to surgery.
Season to radiation and hormone therapy.
Year to the end.
Tick. Tock.
Having said that, I did reach a pinnacle point in my cancer journey; surviving November. November is historically my most hated month, only second to February. It’s the month that sends you out into the cold dark winter without the glimmer of the Christmas and New Year seasons. A flat, dull, bleak, beige-shaded month.
It was the month I first lost Karline two years ago, and now, the month I lost Claire.
I now have two friends who, at the age of 31, dropped to their untimely deaths on a November day from mystery ailments.
But I am hopeful that Karline and Claire are in the ether, chain-smoking while stoned and listening to reggae and emo punk from 2005. Karline would’ve loved Claire’s dreads, and Claire would’ve thought Karline was the most brilliant girl in the world. Their cosmic sisterhood would have worked in this dark, cold, real world.
As the embers from Claire’s bombshell death began to turn to ash, I felt myself losing grip. It happened on the Sunday before my fifth round of chemotherapy (on Wednesday), and everything surrounding that week is a complete blur. My grief melted down into a slow-motion sludge of the post-chemo thought process. Every thought felt heavy and required overthinking for action. As if there was metal in my brain, literally weighing my body down.
And then, Malora got to my house.
Malora, my sister-in-law, is technically my cousin-in-law. However, I am obsessed with her and have called her my sister-in-law since 2010. When Gable was my boyfriend for one month, he giddily wanted her to meet me.
Malora is undoubtedly the most impressive human I have ever met. I don’t even know how to begin conceptualizing her magnitude. Not only her role in my life but her character as a human. Her vast intellect, astronomical wealth of knowledge, ironclad emotional strength, and ethereal beauty are closer to a magical woodland witch than anything I’ve ever seen in real life.
Alongside her husband, she owns a homestead farm in New Hampshire called Crow Tree Farm. Apart from the rows upon rows and greenhouses that cover the farm, there is a wide assortment of farm animals. She has both cared for and slaughtered her animals while thoughtfully using every part of the animal for various uses afterward.
Whether for food or craft, she will blow you away.
If it’s a craft, it’s the most beautiful goddamn piece of art that will you will marvel at for years. If it’s food, it will be the meal that warms your cold heart.
Because if that wasn’t already impressive enough, I could go on to tell you that she is also a baker. Her highly fluffed and perfectly salted loaves of bread are sought after from Andover, New Hampshire, to the nation of the Moore family. Her everything-seasoned sourdoughs, herb-filled focaccia, and chocolate loaves are regularly sold out and fought over at her farm stand.
And let’s not stop there; this girl isn’t just going to bake you bread. Oh no. She’ll also brew you an herb-soaked tea to fix your ailments, all grown from her garden and dried beneath her sun.
Still not feeling great? That’s okay because she’ll give you her homemade bath products ranging from goat’s milk soaps to calendula lotions for nourishment. Chapsticks, salves, tinctures.
Before her daughter’s earth-side arrival, she crafted an arbor for nursing from wood on the property. While pregnant.
Can you tell that it would exhaust me to count all the different ways I’m in awe of her?
I could go on and on about how everything she touches becomes a full-on extension of her. How she never let trauma after tragedy define her next move. The fragments of light she mined from the darkest moments imaginable.
If ever there was a magical presence borne of the Earth, it is undoubtedly Malora. A true twenty-first-century witch who cultivates the magic of the Earth from her northeastern hideaway.
And so, for a whole week, my beautiful forest princess revitalized my tired bones. While wearing her four-month-old daughter, she took over watch of my two small children for almost the entire day. I slept until noon, awoke to her bringing me coffee in bed, and finished each day with her home-cooked meals.
And when I say I finished each day with a meal from Malora, I mean she brought most of her goods directly from her farm in New Hampshire; the meat, the herbs, the dough. All of it.
My weekly menu varied from thick silky curries with naan from scratch to ramen bowls with pork meatballs and sautéed eggs. Her signature sourdough bread bookended gooey cheddar, onion, and avocado before dipping in her roasted tomato soup. Her daily nourishment spiked my diminishing blood counts to where they were before Round #4 of chemo.
And to reiterate again, the entire time she turned my kitchen upside down into a farm-to-table restaurant, she was wearing her four-month-old daughter. Taking walks out the door and back to soothe the occasional cries. Bobbing up and down to prep for nap times. How lucky is that brilliant baby girl to be raised by this absolute force of nature?!
I cried before finally crawling out of bed on the Saturday that she left. Her efforts were more of a vacation for me than I’ve experienced since diagnosis. In fact, other than my husband, I have never ever in my life had someone care for me like Malora.
But for now, the battle continues. December is finally here, and I will crawl through each day. With one last chemo treatment in front of me before January’s partial mastectomy and lymph node removal, it’s safe to say I’m ready to trash 2022.
Kathlyn Ramsey Moore 