How do you measure a year?

October 12, 2011. Note ubiquitous Indian scarf - this one found on a field after a festival - paired with a really great find: a knit cotton top, made in Italy and likely Missoni, that I found at a flea market in Porto Ercole in July.

I don’t wear headphones when I run, preferring to find out what songs come naturally to my mind and body as I go. There are mornings when Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” sets my pace, and times when far less exalted music – such as K$sha’s “Tik Tok” – determines the rhythm of my feet on the pavement. The other morning, tired and coming up a slightly hilly home stretch, I found myself mentally singing “Seasons of Love” from the Broadway musical Rent. It poses a question: “How do you measure, measure a year?” And this is a question much on my mind, because somehow, it’s been more than a year since my seizure, and it’s now the anniversary of my diagnosis.

My friend Frances asked me recently if it all seems very distant. There are aspects of my time in New Zealand that still feel so close and familiar as to be palpable – even now, I’m certain that it’s ingrained in my memory how to get from Auckland Radiation Oncology to the apartment in Hauraki. I know I could recognize the creaky, croaky call of the Tui; remember how the volcanic island of Rangitoto dominated the view from shore at St. Heliers Bay and Takapuna Beach; can still see how the Norfolk Island pine at the end of the driveway was silhouetted against each night’s sunset. I remember the tastes of whole milk passionfruit yogurt by The Collective; Tawari honey; the hand-cut Dan-Dan noodles Jesse and I slurped by the bowlful.

Other details have blurred from those first days, if they were ever clear. I can recall the week between my diagnosis and my neurosurgery only in very specific snapshots and sensory memories: Sam crying by the elevator when we first left the neurosurgeon’s office; how Yani made a sage and browned butter sauce for pasta that first night. How both my father and Steve had the same first reaction to my news, when I called from Dan and Yani’s, which was to utter the word “Shit.” I remember hearing that my sister was traveling for work in Houston, and so was going to be with Jesse and his dad.

The weekend before I went to the hospital, we moved into a vacant furnished apartment that Yani knew about, and Carson took pictures of me and Sam on the muddy tidal flats where the mangroves held the shore in thick, twisted roots. They are, of course, the last photos I have of myself when my skull was intact, before it had a topography. At some point that week I lost a favorite scarf – it wasn’t anything special, just the cheap Indian cotton/rayon type that is ubiquitous among female grad students of a certain stripe. (But it was my ubiquitous cheap Indian scarf, and I had bought it in Kenya!) At some point I watched “Camp Rock 2” on TV and not only wasn’t even embarrassed, but kind of liked Demi Lovato’s voice. At some point my parents arrived. I think it was the day before my surgery, when I had my functional MRI, but I’m not sure. 

And then, oddly enough, things begin to come into sharper focus. Perhaps that’s because, by the time I went to the hospital, I was already beginning to come to terms with what was happening. The night before my surgery, I cried and prayed with Terry, a Methodist minister in Auckland, who would prove to be a dear and steadfast friend. The anesthesiologist, a stylish young woman named Kim, asked me about different health habits, including how much alcohol I typically drank in a week, and joked as an aside, “Probably not as much as me.” I wrote lyrics from the song “The Orchids” – covered by Califone – in my journal: And in the morning after night / I fall in love with the light.

I awoke in the recovery room after surgery and immediately made sure that, in my head, I could still count out the 6/8 time in Handel’s “O Thou That Tellest Good Tidings to Zion.” I related completely inappropriate sexual anecdotes told by my Samoan staff to the nurses in the recovery room. I had a lovely Maori nurse named Aroha (“love”) that first night after surgery, who offered a crisp "Cheers," every time I thanked her. (In recalling these memories, I am reminded of Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day,” in which she says she doesn’t know exactly what a prayer is, but she does know how to pay attention. Amen.)

But if many of these memories are benign or even welcome, the recent anticipation of the anniversaries of my seizure, diagnosis, and surgery has occasionally catapulted me right back to those times of uncertainty and fear last year, where I wasn’t sure how deep I’d fall, or how I’d climb back up, if I let myself really confront my own premature mortality. Thus I find myself crying a lot again this October, too, remembering, even though we’re home and it’s not a North Island spring but a New England autumn. Maybe this month will always remind me of what happened in October 2010, just as occasional twinges in my temples, or putting my head down the wrong way on a pillow, signal something in my body that reminds me: “brain tumor,” although that voice is softer now than it was then.

And yet I have been able to still that voice and to climb back up, each time, as I did then, thanks not just to my own resolve but in large part due to those who supported me then and throughout this hard and beautiful year, from Yani and Dan’s first hospitality in Auckland to my family’s travel and Sam’s sacrifices as a parent and partner, to Jesse shepherding me through radiation, to Terry’s visits every day in the hospital and every week after that, to the friends at home who let me weep over Skype and didn’t try to cheer me up, the friends who sent me scarves and hats and wine and cheese and bought me tickets to see Sharon Jones and countless other gifts of spirit and kindness. What I have found is what songwriter Jonathan Larson concludes in “Seasons of Love”: you can measure a year, or your life, in love.