in to the ground

Late in the ter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death. Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying. (Cancer is also a side effect of dying. Almost everything is, really.) But my mom believed I required treatment, so she took me to see my Regular Doctor Jim, who agreed that I was veritably swimming in a paralyzing and totally clinical depression, and that therefore my meds should be adjusted and also I should attend a weekly Support Group. This Support Group featured a rotating cast of characters in various states of tumordriven unwellness. Why did the cast rotate A side effect of dying. The Support Group, of course, was depressing as hell. It met every Wednesday in the basement of a stonewalled Episcopal church shaped like a cross. We all sat in a circle right in the middle of the cross, where the two boards would have met, where the heart of Jesus would have been. I noticed this because Patrick, the Support Group Leader and only person over eighteen in the room, talked about the heart of Jesus every freaking meeting, all about how we, as young cancer survivors, were sitting right in Christs very sacred heart and whatever. So heres how it went in Gods heart: The six or seven or ten of us walked/wheeled in, grazed at a decrepit selection of cookies and lemonade, sat down in the Circle of Trust, and listened to Patrick recount for the thousandth time his depressingly miserable life storyhow he had cancer in his balls and they thought he was going to die but he didnt die and now here he is, a fullgrown adult in a church basement in the 137th nicest city in America, divorced, addicted to video games, mostly friendless, eking out a meager living by exploiting his cancertastic past, slowly working his way toward a masters degree that will not improve his career prospects, waiting, as we all do, for the sword of Damocles to give him the relief that he escaped lo those many years ago when cancer took both of his nuts but spared what only the most generous soul would call his life. AND YOU TOO MIGHT BE SO LUCKY! Then we introduced ourselves: Name. Age. Diagnosis. And how were doing today. Im Hazel, Id say when theyd get to me. Sixteen. Thyroid originally but with an impressive and longsettled satellite colony in my lungs. And Im doing okay. Once we got around the circle, Patrick always asked if anyone wanted to share. And then began the circle jerk of support: everyone talking about fighting and battling and ning and shrinking and scanning. To be fair to Patrick, he let us talk about dying, too. But most of them werent dying. Most would live into adulthood, as Patrick had.

(Which meant there was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the room. Like, I realize that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure thats one in fiveâ€¦so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards.) The only redeeming facet of Support Group was this kid named Isaac, a longfaced, skinny guy with straight blond hair swept over one eye. And his eyes were the problem. He had some fantastically improbable eye cancer. One eye had been cut out when he was a kid, and now he wore the kind of thick glasses that made his eyes (both the real one and the glass one) preternaturally huge, like his whole head was basically just this fake eye and this real eye staring at you. From what I could gather on the rare occasions when Isaac shared with the group, a recurrence had placed his remaining eye in mortal peril. Isaac and I communicated almost exclusively through sighs. Each time someone discussed anticancer diets or snorting groundup shark fin or whatever, hed glance over at me and sigh ever so slightly. Id shake my head microscopically and exhale in response. So Support Group blew, and after a few weeks, I grew to be rather kickingandscreaming about the whole affair. In fact, on the Wednesday I made the acquaintance of Augustus Waters, I tried my level best to get out of Support Group while sitting on the couch with my mom in the third leg of a twelvehour marathon of the previous seasons Americas Next Top Model, which admittedly I had already seen, but still. Me: I refuse to attend Support Group. Mom: One of the symptoms of depression is disinterest in activities. Me: Please just let me watch Americas Next Top Model. Its an activity. Mom: Television is a passivity. Me: Ugh, Mom, please. Mom: Hazel, youre a teenager. Youre not a little kid anymore. You need to make friends, get out of the house, and live your life. Me: If you want me to be a teenager, dont send me to Support Group. Buy me a fake ID so I can go to clubs, drink vodka, and take pot. Mom: You dont take pot, for starters. Me: See, thats the kind of thing Id know if you got me a fake ID. Mom: Youre going to Support Group. Me: UGGGGGGGGGGGGG. Mom: Hazel, you deserve a life. That shut me up, although I failed to see how attendance at Support Group met the definition of life. Still, I agreed to goafter negotiating the right to record the 1.5 episodes of ANTM Id be missing. I went to Support Group for the same reason that Id once allowed nurses with a mere eighteen months of graduate education to poison me with exotically named chemicals: I wanted to make my parents happy. There is only one thing in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when youre sixteen, and thats having a kid who bites it from cancer.

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