Morning.

The past two days have been hellish. Travel always wreaks havoc on my body. And the past two nights have been no different. I sedate myself but to no relief. I'm barely conscious, awake enough to know pain.

This morning I drove to the pharmacy at 6am, just as it opened. I am desperate for relief. I am so done with this body, with this pain. But I'll never be tired of my life, and the joy and beauty that sustain me through so many awful days and nights. 

I am too attached to this life and this love to ever give up.

Tough Shit

Maddy told me to show my muscles, so I did.

I am living a full life through the pain.

I am living.

And that's how I earned these muscles.

One Day

We are trying to find a way to break up.

At 7, I wake up and drive alongside the ocean for 12 wide miles, a route I’ve done more times than I can count. I used to do it on my way to high school, to pick up my best friend, even though it was completely out of the way. I used to watch the sunrise, peaking over the dunes, over the mansions, empty in the winter and bustling in the summer.

Along Ocean Avenue, women run in pink and men are not there, already in the city for work by the time I depart at 7am. Jogging strollers smack the smoothed pavement, replaced over the winter after Superstorm Sandy.

The debris is less now; the summer is approaching its’ end at breakneck speed. It has been an odd summer, a bit crippled. We cheer when our favorite bars and restaurants and beaches reopen; we reconcile the fact that some may never open again.

I head over the bridge into Atlantic Highlands, the ocean behind me and the river on my left and right, Twin Lights lighthouse straight ahead. I’ve tried to take pictures of this view, but it simply cannot be captured. The blue water around me, stretching for miles.

I stop to get coffee and then I am at my sister’s front door, my niece clapping because she’s excited to see me.

The morning is hot, hotter than it’s been, a welcome August tradition of sticky seats. I believe in the weather, the moods, the feelings. The way the sun shines when you need it most, and rain for the days you need to stop and rest

Last night I didn’t sleep because of the sores in my mouth and the anxiety bouncing in my stomach, turning the walls of my gut raw and aching.

The baby and I visit my friend, my writing mentor. She asks about writing. She tells me I will finish the book when I’m ready. I’m not ready.

I drive in circles for an hour to let Sadie sleep in the backseat. I drive past Bruce Springteen’s house and remember the time I almost ran over his wife. When I pull back into my sister’s driveway, the baby’s face is red and angry from the sun streaming through her window. Fuck, I think. Sunscreen.

I’m shaking from the pain as I lift Sadie into her crib. I pray she will sleep. I take a painkiller. I rest on the couch.

We go to the park, me pulling Sadie in her wagon, her laughing as I imitate a train. She is so easy, this one. So full of light.

The young boys at the park on their skateboards make me so nostalgic for my youth I stop and take a breath. They are sweaty and throwing empty soda cans at each other. The girls on their bikes look at them as they pass the park, already deciding on which boys are cute, taller since June. I remember this feeling so strongly, how we loved the boys before they knew how to love us.

When I get home, I talk again to B. I say I think we are making the right decision, that for me, a weight has lifted. He says he will always be my biggest fan. We are not breaking up because of lack of feeling, and so perhaps this is the saddest end of all. I dangerously let allow myself a sliver of hope to cushion these sharp edges. But I feel lucky to have him  as my friend, the first man that I’ve dated that I know I will be friends with forever.

I know now what they mean when they say that timing is everything. It really is. I got a niece just as I got sicker than I’ve ever been, and her love buoys me through all the shit. I got BJ when we both weren’t in a place to love each other properly, but I get to keep him, albeit in a different space.

I confirm my reservation for my hotel in Big Sur next weekend, the long weekend a perfect time to give us a breather. The holiday, the bookend to the summer, always makes me a little sad. But I’m already a little sad, so I shall bid summer adieu in my favorite place on earth with my best friend and his daughter.

The night stretches into the early morning and I sleep in hour intervals. I miss him, even though I’ll see him before I go to LA. I enroll in a Shakespeare class to fill the fall. The autumn will be full of traveling and my sister’s wedding and time, constantly unfurling, bringing us to where we are, whether we like it or not.

And on and on we march.

Lauren

My friend is dead. She has been dead since Thanksgiving. 

I am terrified of the monsters that roar inside of me, waiting for the right moment to strike. I hate the parallels in our stories. I hate the word cancer. I fucking hate seeing it everywhere. I get sweaty and nauseous. I fucking hate that word. Why does it have to be everywhere? Can't it be like You Know Who? Why do we have to say the word so much? Voldemort, cancer, Voldemort. It's put a trace on me, that word. It's everywhere.

I visited Lauren's mom with my old coworkers yesterday and at times the silence was thick with our own memories and recollections. The copier in the blue room where she told me she had melanoma. The ninth floor of 16 W 22nd Street, New York, NY. A place I'll never be again.

We talked about it, a lot. I was her "cancer mentor," we joked. We hated the word, we hated the smell of hospitals, we hated the shitty food and the steroids and the ways our bodies were carved and shaped into something we didn't recognize.

I miss my friend. I miss our little community. The two of us and a tie that would bond us forever.

Sometimes I see a really cheesy "beat cancer" ad and I want to laugh maliciously at it with her. We made fun of those things. 

We wanted to believe we were as real as we could be about cancer, but we were both terrified and sometimes we could not speak of it.

Some days I can't believe she's gone. I worry about the monsters. I feel guilty telling her mom I'm doing well because her daughter is dead.

No matter what my troubles, my pain, struggles, I get to live. I get to fall in love and eat and sing into my hairbrush and drink and tattoo my body and live. 

Lauren doesn't. All of her memories have been made. They're for us now. And it's so fucking unfair, because I never knew someone who wanted to live as much as she did.  I survived and some days I don't move from my bed. Lauren would understand but I should be doing more.

I have to live more, because she can't. I have to be kind and live big and write, like she always bugged me to. I need to write about cancer and the word and how heavy it hangs around your neck. 

I miss my friend. But I'm going to keep on. 

I'm going to Be Kind and Live Big.

New Huffington Post Piece

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kelly-bergin/escaping-chronic-illness_b_3677180.html

Rooted

Here’s the thing.

I love Los Angeles. I wish I still lived there. When I lived there, it was right for me and I felt great.

But that was before Sadie.

I’ve been traveling a lot this year, and when I’m gone for more than a week, I worry she’s forgotten me. I worry she might even miss me, even though she’s only 9 months old. I worry I will miss something.

Three days a week I have her while my sister and brother-in-law (to be) work. Three days a week where my life is so much brighter, where my life feels like it could be so much longer. 

I never want to miss one of those days, those weeks, those months with her.

I’m rooted now, in her. In her red, curly hair. In her Army crawl and loud giggles that attract the attention of everyone in Wegmans. She’s not mine–she’s got the greatest mother in the world–but she’s attached to me in a way I didn’t expect but so, so cherish.

So, no; I’ll probably never live in Los Angeles for more than a winter at a time. I’ll probably move back to Brooklyn when my health is right. I’ll never leave Sadie, not for long.

This is the only place for me

Get Me to Dry Land: FD2 in Montana

One year ago, I headed to the Outer Banks for my first program with First Descents, an organization that provides outdoor adventures for young adult cancer survivors. As many of you know, this program has enriched my life and pushed me to do things I'd never dream of doing before cancer. (See: that half marathon relay I ran.)

I remember coming home from my trip a year ago, invigorated and changed, telling everyone that surfing was the hardest sport I'd ever tried and that kayaking next year would definitely be easier. I couldn't imagine being more exhausted than I was last June.

(Ha.)

And that's truly what I believed until this past week, when I headed to Montana to kayak for my FD2 program.

I truly thought kayaking would involve just floating down some rapids. No standing up in the middle of ferocious waves.

But no. Whitewater kayaking is nothing like surfing. Yes, it's physically demanding and there's like, this water stuff, involved, but you're in a boat for 6 hours at a time. There aren't any breaks to hang out on the beach and eat grapes while ogling at surf instructors like I MAY have done in the Outer Banks.

If you're cold while you're kayaking, you're going to stay cold for six hours. If you're sneezing and coughing, you have to stay on the water, even though you are praying to God to make the week fly by. Which I did, more than once.

Kayayking can be pure misery if you're weak or tired or cranky. Three things I've been known to be.

And yet, I had one of the best weeks of my entire life.

And I was about to faint, shaking like a neurologist's dream patient, tired and exhausted when I realized it.

It was our first day on the water, and we had just graduated from the lake to the creek. Toward the end of the day, my kayak had flipped, completely surprising and scaring me.

When the boats came to save me, my already broken and bent arm was caught between a tree and a kayak and I was halfway submerged and in swirly water. I swam behind the boat to a little island where my camp directors and guides helped check me out and empty my boat. I was bruised and scratched and tired...

But I felt completely fucking alive.

And for me, this feeling of vitality saw me through a week where I felt like shit and wanted to sleep all day. I picked up a cold that steadily worsened throughout the week, and I couldn't kayak much because of my broken elbow and busted collarbone. (Turns out those two particular bones are useful when it comes to paddling.)

There were certain points of the week where I watched new friends challenge themselves and I felt helpless and stupid, a log on the sweeper raft that carried our gear and supplies. Every time my thoughts strayed this way, I tried to infuse myself with the inspiration I felt watching my friends surpass their own expectations.

At night, we ate great food and talked about cancer, how it had changed and hurt us, opened and broke us. How to parent, or decide to parent, or take on relationships with this heavy weight sometimes feeling like it was squeezing us tighter and tighter each passing day. We talked about how to kayak with cancer and how not to kayak with cancer: we talked about how to let yourself off the hook.

For a trip that could seem to others as depressing or morbid, I felt more alive than I have in months, even while admitting I was down for the count, not as strong as I wanted to be.

I have always struggled with pretending it's all okay in order to do the things that I've wanted to do: I went to a music festival in Tennessee two weeks after my appendix burst; I put off the doctor for a week when I broke my arm last month; I ignored the golf ball in my neck that turned out to be cancer. I regularly switch between telling the truth about how I feel and turning and telling everyone not to worry. I do it for others, but I mostly do it for myself.

You're fine, I'll say. This hurts, I'll say. I want to give up, I'll say. I want to keep living, I'll say. All within the course of a minute in my head.

This week reminded me that that is what life with illness is about. Leaning into the hard times (or the current) just so you can shoot down the rapid ahead. And that excuberance you feel when you look back and see what you've done?

That is joy. That is life. That is out living it.

Thank you to First Descents for another amazing week. Patch, Pedro, Braveheart: your friendship means the world to me. Thanks to our camp moms, who I want to adopt me so I can have a trio of moms badgering me about water. And thanks to Bomb and the Dude and our AMAZING guides for taking such good care of me.

I'm planning to run/walk a 5K in order to raise money for this organization that has taught me so much. You can donate here: http://teamfd.firstdescents.org/2013/fd/kellybergindotcom/. Thank you kindly!