The Corinna Posts 3: What Am I Looking For?

I’m writing about my oldest friend who died of cancer, but I’m starting to think I’m just writing about me. You can find the first Corinna post here and the second here.

Corinna was officially diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer on March 6, 2021, when doctors discovered liver metastases during surgery to remove a tumor in her colon. I date her illness to Valentine’s Day of that year, when they first saw something on her scans. She had gone to the ER the day before because of pain from the gastrointestinal issues that had been plaguing her for months. All this is to say that when Catherine Newman’s¹ novel² about her best friend’s death from ovarian cancer³ came out in November 2022, I wanted nothing to do with it, being as how I was living cancer and pushing away the idea of death.

But We All Want Impossible Things came to mind as I started to think about elegies for friends in the wake of Corinna’s death. This week, I finally took the plunge. Spoiler: it didn’t help. Not because there’s anything wrong with it, but because, well, me. And maybe Corinna.

The parallels started on the first page, when Edi, the dying best friend, wants to taste good food but isn’t hungry. Same with Corinna. Edi and Ash, the novel’s narrator and Newman stand-in, call their hospice doctor Dr. Soprano because he looks like James Gandolfini; we called the oncologist on rounds the last time Corinna was hospitalized Dr. Tennis because she looked like a woman who plays tennis at the club (she turned out to be awesome). Edi watches the live feed of a pregnant giraffe, while Corinna watched YouTube videos of drunk white women being arrested, both maintaining trivial pursuits until the very end. Ash awkwardly hugs Edi in her bed and tries to reassure her as she cries about leaving her child, just as I awkwardly hugged Corinna in her bed, trying to reassure her as she cried about leaving her children.

But this could all just be cancer and dying thereof, right? The endless texts, update emails, PICC lines, and constipation; evaporating words that could be brain metastases, pharmaceutical highs, or both; wondering what death will look like and how we impending survivors will survive: it all feels so immediate and personal as it is happening, yet surely it is largely universal, at least to western medicalized cancer deaths.

Except there’s more. Edi and Ash sang “Dona, Dona” in nursery school; we sang “Dona, Dona” in grade school. Edi’s brother brings Russ & Daughters to the hospice; I suggested sending Russ & Daughters when faraway friends asked what they could do for Corinna. When Edi gets to the morphine stage, she says, “I did always want to try heroin”; when Corinna got to the oxycodone stage, I said, “Maybe you should try heroin.”⁴

So, not only shared doctor nicknames and constipation, but shared experiences and sensibility, yet this too is easily legible. Newman and her best friend Ali, their fictional doppelgangers Ash and Edi, me and Corinna: we are all of the same generation and the same Jewish-inflected, New-York-and-Massachusetts-centered, Ivy League/adjacent, quick, sarcastic, confident (even when we’re not), intellectual, pop cultural, foodie elite.

So I suspect one reason We All Want Impossible Things didn’t enlighten me about losing a friend is that I’ve already lived not just the book’s fundamental narrative but many of its specifics.

Another reason is that the book’s fundamental narrative is about the dying and the losing, a process narrative if you will, beginning in hospice and ending with Edi’s funeral (Ash gives a eulogy, I gave a eulogy). It’s also about Edi and Ash’s friendship, both in that process and in flashbacks, but that too is over by the end of the book, at least in its literal form. And at this point, having lived that narrative and its ending, I realized I am more interested in the after-death experience of loss, which is why I found “Lycidas” so compelling, even though I had no connection to its specifics.

The third reason is pettier. Corinna was amazing and I loved her passionately and my life will never again be complete without her. But she could also be a real pain in the ass, even when she had cancer, even when she was dying. Whereas Edi is pretty much perfect at every turn: patient, appreciative, cute, quippy, never angry or unreasonable. She even dies appealingly, as her closest friends and family sing “Let It Be” around her deathbed (Corinna would never).

In interviews, Newman says that her depiction of Edi and Ash’s friendship and their hospice experience are true to life, though some elements of the novel are not, most critically Edi leaving her husband and seven-year-old son in New York to enter hospice in Massachusetts where Ash lives. As Newman puts it, “That kind of wishful thinking is where fiction is very handy!” Sure enough, everything else resolves delightfully in We All Want Impossible Things, aside, of course, from the one impossible thing we can never have or resolve.⁵

And I think that’s one more rub. I don’t know - and don’t really care - whether Ali really was perfect or Newman burnished her into Edi in the writing of the book. In fact, kudos either way: she has written a beautiful elegy for a beautiful friendship and a beautiful, terrible time and that’s what matters.

But my friend was complicated, I may be unduly focused on myself in her aftermath, and I seem to be reading and writing my way around both, looking for…whatever it is I’m looking for. Presumably I’ll know when I find it, or maybe I’ll end up having to create it myself.

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The Way We Live Now

Last night, I went to a protest in support of Rukeysa Ozturk, the Tufts graduate student who was detained by ICE on Tuesday afternoon in Somerville, Massachusetts.

The protest was at a park on the edge of the Tufts campus, and it was all the familiar things: signs, speeches, chants, gray-haired people who’ve been doing this for a long time (this is Boston, that is me, that is my mother who was also there but I couldn’t find her till the end), fired-up youth, parents with their children.

But my god, the number of people, that was something else.

I was late, not with my usual “because of course,” but because I had a long-scheduled 5:00 meeting. As I approached Powderhouse Square, people were walking away from the park, and I feared the protest was over. But when I arrived, the hill was covered, which is to say packed, with people. I thought 1,000, then conservatized to several hundred. Last night the Boston Globe said 2,000, which I figured meant 3,000 given media crowd estimate habits. This morning the Globe says several thousand, which means huge.

I’ve always been a go-to-the-protest person because I am compelled to temper my pessimism with action. But since the election, even as my hitherto non-protesting friends are rising up, I haven’t been to a single protest because, well, because I haven’t. But I’ve been watching protests in Israel since before October 7, and in Serbia since I had dinner with a fired up Serbian a couple of months ago, and now in Turkey. All these countries are farther down the authoritarian road than we are, none of these protests have any certainty of succeeding, and yet they are inspirational signals of possibility. Protests are what overturn authoritarian governments, and protests only happen when people show up. So, yeah, I guess I’m back to protesting.⁶

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Because we still deserve nice things…

Look at this leucistic (not albino) toddler alligator, one of only eight known leucistic alligators in the world. Her name is Mystic and isn’t she the nicest little thing? It was hard to tear ourselves away and move on to the time-worn elderly leucistic alligator, who was interesting but a little creepy so we didn’t take her picture. But that’s ok because we still have little Mystic.

1. Here is where I make my disclaimer that I slightly know Catherine Newman, who is friends with my sister, lovely, smart, and hilarious.

2. It makes me furious that Bookshop, the independent-bookstore-supporting Amazon alternative, doesn’t come up when you search for a book. It’s always Amazon first, then a couple of reviews, then usually the publisher, then all kinds of random shit BECAUSE BIG TECH IS IN COLLUSION. Sometimes I link to the publisher, which should come up first for god’s sake except GOOGLE SEARCH IS PREDICATED ON SELLING YOU SHIT. But I also like to support Bookshop. Fortunately, I have the time and politics to search {novel title + bookshop} every time I forget Amazon’s Google-enabled preeminence, which is every time, but IT STILL MAKES ME MAD.

3. Somehow, in the years that I was not reading this book but occasionally still thinking about it, its ovarian cancer morphed into my - that is, Corinna’s - colon cancer. Abdominal cancers are hideous BFFs, so I wasn’t completely out of line, but also I was.

4. As I uncovered these similarities, I had a sense of deja vu, like I’d written about this before. Finally, I remembered this passage from this essay about my father-in-law’s death, which is something of a counterpart/point to this post, down to Edi dying in hospice and Corinna dying at home:

Like Freud, my father-in-law approached the end with peace and resolution in the early hours of the morning. When Roiphe describes his daughter Anna’s reaction to his death—“He was so much himself to the last minute that Anna would feel as if he were just off on one of his journeys, with her keeping things in order until he came back”—she named exactly what I felt.

But if Freud’s experience could mirror many, John Updike’s directly reflected my father-in-law’s. Updike, too, had a worrisome cough that wouldn’t go away, leaving him stuck in an “empty anxious time” (I thought of my vibrant, ever-active father-in-law unable to do anything but worry and the chores of daily life). The handwriting of both men became cramped and even more unreadable than it had been. Then Updike had a CAT scan, receiving a diagnosis of dire lung cancer.

There were differences: Updike kept writing poetry, and my father-in-law stopped writing philosophy; Updike lasted a few more weeks from diagnosis to death and died in hospice rather than at home. Still, his story triangulated my father-in-law’s, affirming their ubiquity and singularity, anchoring me in our reality.

5. You know what this is, right? I know you do, but I’m scared you might not, not because I think you’re dumb, but because I’m anxious that way, so I will tell you that the ultimate impossible thing we want, at least in terminal cancer world, is for the dying person to live.

6. The radical youth speakers said we should stop calling our politicians and going to protests and instead focus on mutual aid and getting to know our neighbors, but I’m neither that young nor that radical and I already know my neighbors, so I still called my senators on the way home because I contain multitudes.