Personal Training

What does it mean to love another person? What does it mean to love someone who is sick? Can you really love everything about that person? Even their illness?

I have been fairly effortlessly healthy all my life. Genetics, nutrition, lifestyle – these all contributed to a fully functioning body that rarely lets me down.

Appendicitis last fall was a gut-punch that sidelined me for a couple of weeks. My cure was exercise, as it so often is. I walked the halls a mere two hours after the surgery, bent over and clinging to my IV cart. I ran a mile or so at the park 10 days after surgery.

Getting up and moving around were the panacea my mother taught me long ago. Be it flu, a cold, arthritis or depression, your ailment can be ameliorated with exercise. That was her mantra. She read “The Bell Jar” at my urging when I was in high school – probably because she desperately wanted some tiny glimpse into my sullen teenaged psyche.

Her response to the lead character’s suicide attempt? “I wanted to slap her and make her go outside for a walk!”

At the time, I thought my mother’s reaction was obtuse, cold even. Now, not so much.

Dating someone who has cancer is harder than I thought it would be. Not because of doctor’s visits or medications or squeamishness about bodily functions. I have no problem with any of those.

No, the problem is that I still think the cure for everything is exercise. I want Stacy to walk to the store with me and do yoga with me. Every time she wants to spend the day in bed or on the couch because she has a headache or feels weak, I find myself trying to get her up and moving. I try to convince her that a walk will do her good, that the fresh air will revive her – even though that air is persistently below freezing this month – that endorphins and other internal cheerleaders will make the effort worthwhile.

In short, I am now my mother.

The really frustrating part is that my own body is beginning to betray me. A nagging issue with my hip is making my regular runs a minefield of pain. And I can’t seem to find the magic combo of stretches and therapy to quell the trouble.

So what do I do? Ignore it. Run through it. Pretend it will work itself out. And, most importantly, get mad at myself when I succumb to the pain and either skip the workout or opt for something less punishing, like a stationary bike. Very healthy.

One day I will not be able to ignore it. Same goes for Stacy's cancer. I've got to train myself to remember that, embrace it, prepare for that moment.

Like everything that I have gone through this past year or so, this situation is trying to teach me patience. I have to be patient with Stacy because I do not really know what it feels like inside her skin. I do not know what it feels like to have endured 14 months of chemotherapy and the maximum radiation allowed a person in a lifetime. I do not know what it feels like to have had the ultimate betrayal from one’s body: a malignant tumor in the brain that might grow back and steal one’s life at any moment.

I do not know what it feels like to have convinced oneself that the end is near, one’s days are numbered – and then to be told that, well, maybe not all that. Maybe death is not so near or so certain. Maybe.

One clean MRI does not mean you’re cured. It does, however, mean that there is a chance for longevity, for a life without a definite expiration date, for the same uncertainty we all live with about death, rather than the ominous certainty of a dire prognosis.

I know I am going to die. And everyone I know is going to die. My mother, my siblings, all of my friends and enemies: we are all going to die. Some day. Some day.

But not today. Today I am alive and the sun is shining behind those frosty late winter clouds. Today I can still stand up, move my arms, walk right out that door and into my life. Today is a vibrant and elusive opportunity to suck a little marrow out of this speedracer careening toward death. Today I am alive.

And I will keep nagging Stacy to embrace her life while she has it. While I have her. And I will do my best to practice patience, with her and with myself, so we can make the most of whatever time we have together.

Will I Smell as Sweet?

I spent the first 26 years of my life with my father’s last name. Then I spent 23 years with my husband’s last name. I will now spend the rest of my life with a name of my own choosing.

My maternal great-grandmother chose her own name. She was born October 18, 1894 and her parents called her Dutch until she graduated from high school. They couldn’t seem to settle on a name, so they simply let her choose her own legal name when she became an adult. She chose Mary for the woman who sewed her graduation dress and Adelaide for a family friend. Best was her last name because that was her father’s last name.

I only met Nanny — as we called Mary Adelaide in my family — once when I was 3 or 4 years old. I clearly remember climbing the wooden stairs on the outside of the two-story house in Punxsutawney that belonged to my grandmother’s sister where Nanny lived out her final years. She sat in an oversize easy chair leaning on a cane. She wore enormous black men’s shoes. When my brother took me to the bathroom, I was frightened of the claw feet on the tub. I think I thought the tub was going to chase me.

When I stayed with my mom after leaving my husband’s house, Mom told me stories about Nanny. How she loved to dance and go to parties. How she and her husband, John Sherman McCoy, slept in separate bedrooms for years. How the first time Pup-Pup – as we called Great-Grampa McCoy in my family – hit her, Nanny picked up a chair and broke it over his head. How that may have also been the impetus for the separate bedrooms.

Nanny was short — five foot three — and homely. But in all the photographs I have of her, she is smiling brightly.

She died in 1977. Her daughters, Helen and Mary Ellen, lived about 35 years longer. Her granddaughter is my mother, who I hope will continue living for a long time to come.

March 1 of this year I appeared in a magistrate’s office and legally changed my name to Sharon Best.

If you have read any of my earlier blogs, you know that I recently blew up my life and am forging a new one. I spent all of 2017 being as entirely honest as I could be, both with everyone in my life and with myself – which was, honestly, the hardest part. Moving forward, honesty is still my main tenet. But it’s a little more than that.

I try every day to be the best possible person I can be. How that manifests on any given day changes, but the focus on being and doing my best does not. If I do my best and behave in ways that align with my core values, I should have no cause for regret.

Marriage and divorce are common causes for a name change, so I decided I would to take the opportunity to change my name and reclaim that part of my identity.

As I focused on the idea of honesty and empowerment over the last year, I contemplated what name I could take that would reflect my efforts to be my best self. For a while the name Frank held the top position. But it seemed a little too on the nose.

Then, when I told my mom about my name changing idea, she told me about Nanny choosing her own name after being nameless for so long.

Those stories about Nanny immediately rang true. The fact that she chose her own name seemed like predestination.

Choosing a name that is connected to my matrilineal family and that will remind me every day to be the best possible version of myself feels incredibly empowering. When I got my new driver’s license, it read like this:

Best

Sharon

That’s what I feel like these days: the best Sharon there has been yet.

Over the next weeks and months, I’ll be changing to my new legal name on many platforms. I’ll do my best to link existing email and other accounts to new ones so we all have a chance to catch up. But there might be some that fall through the cracks and there might be a few I leave in my former name. If you address me as my new name and it takes a minute for me to acknowledge it, be patient with me. Like everything else I've changed over the last year, this is a process that will take some time.