Ilene
"
Cancer can't make me a different spirit. It made me a more gentle spirit."
I am Ilene Alizah Kaminsky. Alizah means happiness in Hebrew. I am a great granddaughter of a rabbi and cantor from St. Petersburg, Russia, who emigrated in 1910 through Ellis Island. I am apparently 99.0% Ashkenazic Jew according to my genes. Spiritual yet non-practicing, I meditate daily, give thanks to the universe and God for each day, and hold space in my heart for others who are struggling with their own cancer. Yet my stage 4 metastatic breast cancer (which is hormone receptor-positive diagnosed de novo from the start 5 years and six months ago) is not BRCA 1/2 positive. Nor is it genetic.
I wrote my first poem at six years old, which my mother kept a copy of - she died from Alzheimer’s at 74. My father died from brain cancer at 71. My paternal grandmother died from metastatic breast cancer in 1969.
My mom was 25 when I was born. Apparently I stood up immediately and began talking. And I still have a lot to say, but perhaps not because I just hack up words like a cat with a furball, but I ask questions and love language. Perhaps I'm boring you already. Rule number two, break rule number one. What rules?
Cancer brought me not to my knees but off of them. My diagnosis didn't phase me as it probably should have. I started writing poetry fervently again and started a personal blog. It's got a growing 2,000+ subscriber base, 50% of whom have cancer or are dealing with cancer in some way. Some are poetry writers, others have an interest in biography, I assume. I'm delighted by the fact that, as my partner of 10 years started coming out of his foggy anxiety and depression laden brain, he reads my poetry and essays as if he's found a new and somehow famous side of me he never knew. I find his flattering comments funny. I have always been shy to compliments.
As so many other days before, I sat atop my radiator looking out for the last time from a 16th floor window of my bedroom in Flushing, Queens, New York. I wrote my first poem at six years old, relishing in its warmth as snow fell on the swings in the shared playground. However on that day, my 8th birthday, my eyes followed the pillowy woman who held my dog, Peaches. This peach poodle left along with this woman, who I'd never know again. She was my mother's sister’s housekeeper. June 21st, 1973.
My father, Len, long gone to live with a Puerto Rican woman and her half black son not very long after my paternal grandmother died from metastatic breast cancer to her brain at the age of 62 in 1969. My dad hadn't a clue we were moving. He was attending the New School at the time and held a job as a social worker at the welfare department of NYC.
I get my liberal politics from watching his adult life unfold through a career based on the notion that one person can indeed make a difference. The language of my upbringing hadn’t any words for different races, for racist, sexist, anti-religious, or anti-anything thinking. My kindness to people, my intellectual nature (or so my mother said), my love of music and sense of humor. My ability to make friends easily…all in my nature or nurtured by my father.
However, once dad deemed my level of progress well-positioned for him to make his escape from our household to another, my mother sold off everything we owned. And my dog wasn't coming along. Just another thing my mom said I didn't need.
My brother three years my junior in the back seat, me in the passenger seat, and mom behind sunglasses and the black leather covered steering wheel - our driving configuration for years - of her two door Galaxy 500. She lit up a Marlboro red, rolled down the window with the chromed hand crank, out of one of the last times I’d see her parallel park, we ambled down Sanford Avenue. The last to evacuate The City towards warmer, one-wardrobe climates and the remaining three grandparents and my mother's other relatives who led the Rothman / Kaminsky diaspora from New York to South Florida.
Pictures fill in much of the details for me now. The white and yellow daisy fabrics, the frilly dresses, the snow pants, the swing set with one of about 10 faces whose arms fully extended to push me in the seat - higher, higher! Please! The birthday parties with and without my brother in a high chair seated next to me. Friends whose lives I could not track, not remembering their last names, too embarrassed to ask for information. Boys and girls I’d not recognize or remember if I ran into them at a party or at work. The other tall girl in my kindergarten, first, second, and third grade classes at PS 22. No one remembers me, either.
I cannot remember if I cried during the packing or the drive or upon our arrival. I was always a “mature” kid, such a “big girl;” taller and mouthier than everyone else - 6 feet by 8th grade. To ask Elaine Rothman Kaminsky Tramobte, a Bronx born Jew who never completed her teaching coursework at Queens College due to overrun games of bridge with “the guys.” Though my mother teaching high school seems a complete farce to me now that I think about her when in the company of teenagers.
I completed elementary school in North Miami Beach. Long legs carrying me to school and to the single family houses of nearby friends when I could get away from taking care of my brother. Elaine worked two jobs, one during the day and one from seven to midnight, Thursday through Saturday. I learned to cook at grandma Sylvia's side and my mother's when she had the time to teach me. When she was home.
I cannot say I completed high school since it was imperative I take jobs to support myself from the age of 14 onwards. She took my brother and went to live with my future stepfather, a Sicilian former alcoholic whose daughter lived around the corner from me purely by coincidence. We remain close but she lives in Georgia and I live out here and rarely if ever will she take trips to see me and has only once since my diagnosis with stage four breast cancer. Instead of finishing high school, I dropped out shy of completing 11th grade. I worked job after job until I was 18 and old enough to take my GED and completed my AA while living in Gainesville, Florida.
I wanted to attend the University of Florida. After several rejected applications, I finally wrote a letter to the chancellor of the state of Florida’s educational board throwing myself at his merciful side and offering him a success story he could share as his own. The very first day of matriculation in 1991 I attended for three years and graduated with honors in English and a minor in philosophy. To this day I have tried my very best to use that degree to become a successful human being.
My beliefs have changed several times since; however, I'm still in some ways sitting on the radiator in New York watching my dog go away, waiting to go on a long trip to warmer climates. Wishing for secure surroundings and love to stay longer than a little while.
I hope my words connected with you somehow in a way that you may see I do not define myself by my career, by cancer, or lack of my own children. I forgive easily, my tenacity brought me through life and my humor through the times when even tenacity wouldn't do. I am a spirit of positive energy and lightness of being who will live to tell you in person that I have no bloody idea how to do any of this stuff.
Cancer can't make me a different spirit. It made me a more gentle spirit. That's all I can hope for now. At least I think so, anyway.
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