When Death Isn’t the Fear: A Soul-Shaking Review of “A Battle with My Blood”

Tatiana Schlossberg was a mother, an environmental journalist, and a cancer patient – in that order. She passed away at the age of 35 a few days ago. And she had written an essay about her last days.

The scope of my essay on hers is to highlight her love for her life, her clarity of thought during those tough times and the inevitability of being forgotten even by our loved ones once we die.

The recurring theme of her thoughts is her memories of her life that she seems to “sift through the sands.” A few hours after her second child’s birth, when her obstetrician wonders if her elevated white blood count could be leukemia, she announces to her husband that “It’s not leukemia.”

Even as her 2-year-old tries to ride her hospital bed like a bus, they are separated from each other so the hospital can do tests on her. “This could not possibly be my life.” She says to herself as she sees a fracture in who she was and what she’s being told she is now.

The essay then delves into the history of her diagnosis, her visits to the hospital and the number of times she would undergo chemotherapy. Under all this medical narrative, there are some aspects of this gut-wrenching essay that stick. Cruelly enough, it feels like it’s always the healthiest ones among us to fall first. “I regularly ran five to ten miles in Central Park. I had swum a mile in the pool the day before, nine months pregnant.”

She talks about the surge of kindness from friends and family. And how she had “never encountered a group of people who are more competent, more full of grace and empathy, more willing to serve others than nurses.” “Nurses should take over,” she declares.

There are passages in the essay that show her indignation at life being cut so short. She lovingly talks about her husband in this context, on how she had managed to find him. “He is perfect, and I feel so cheated and so sad that I don’t get to keep living the wonderful life I had with this kind, funny, handsome genius I managed to find.”

Schlossberg also talks about government funding, public health, politics, and health care in her essay. The reason I don’t write about it because politics is a polarizing topic, and she could write about it like someone who’s not afraid to lose anything.

Through clinical trials, chemotherapy, and immunotherapy, she’s barely kept alive. “I tried to be the perfect patient. If I did everything right… then it would work.” Amid all the gloom, she’s also hopeful even when she’s powerless. During this whole time, she’s barely able to participate in the beautiful rituals that her children are performing as they grow up.

How many more times can I watch the video of him trying to say “Anna Karenina”? What about when I told him I didn’t want ice cream from the ice-cream truck, and he hugged me, patted me on the back, and said, “I hear you, buddy, I hear you”? I think about the first time I came home from the hospital. He walked into my bathroom, looked at me, and said, “It’s so nice to meet you in here.”

 

Then there’s my daughter, her curly red hair like a flame, squinting her eyes and grinning a gap-toothed grin after taking a sip of seltzer. She stomps around the house in bright-yellow rain boots, pretending to talk on my mother’s phone, a string of fake pearls around her neck, no pants, giggling and running away from anyone who tries to catch her. She asks us to play James Brown’s “I Got the Feelin’ ” by picking up a portable speaker and saying, “Baby, baby.”

It’s a powerful essay to remind us of our own short life here and for her to know that the end was near, while she had to mourn not being there for her children is unbearable.

You can read Tatiana Schlossberg’s full essay, A Battle with My Blood, in the New Yorker HERE.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/a-battle-with-my-blood

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