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  • Torpor:A meditation on literary hibernation
  • L. B. Thompson (bio)

A few cold weeks into March, it appears as though the Worm Moon balances on my neighbor's weather vane. I think the old weather vane is made of copper; a green-gray patina encrusts it completely. Fixed above a dilapidated barn, it is shaped like a fish, as many of the adornments are in this old fishing village, with its deepwater harbor and visiting tall ships. Tonight the moon seems glazed, like the whitened eye of a fish left too long on the stringer. Under the crust of snow that melts at noontime and turns to ice again in the darkness these ten days since snowfall, down in the cold mud, the earthworms begin to grow hungry. The nine elderly maples along the edge of my yard are waking up, too. North of here, in Vermont and New Hampshire, the men must be tromping out in their boots to tap the trees, to hang the sap buckets as their grandfathers did before them. My mouth waters, imagining a small pitcher of hot maple syrup and the smell of its thick steam as I pour. My appetite is back; I must be waking up, too.

Throughout my recent struggles with cancer, I characterized my befuddled state as a kind of hibernation. The torpor has spanned several years, with rare windows of lucid productivity. The most dominant characteristic of illness is negation: illness is a state that is neither death nor health. And now that the moon casts its flat eye on the garden and I feel my heartbeat picking up, my temperature rising, I don't want to leave this hibernation without understanding it. I've been in some parallel place very much like sleep, not dead or comatose. There must be a way to talk about "what happened" or "where I was" during this strange time.

There have been nights when my terrier smells opossum, the only marsupial in this part of the world, and he runs panting into the night garden, hunting this weird species so old its fossils are mingled with those of the brontosaurus. I follow with a flashlight and see the rat-tailed creature curled by the far fence. It doesn't move, but I know it is not dead, only wearing death's disguise. I [End Page 7] scoop it into a shovel and carry it out of the garden. After my flashlight's circle has bounced away, smaller and smaller, the opossum will feel convinced of its safety and stir out of its shocked coil to stand. What did the opossum feel? Did it feel the blade of the shovel cold under its back, the rhythm of my walking?

During the hibernation of my illness, everything in me slowed down. The jabbering television jarred me, the witty conversation of my friends sailed over my head, and I was always relieved to nod into sleep. I was often unable to eat, and when my weight dropped below one hundred pounds, the cold constantly shook me. My body temperature had sunk a couple of degrees. I remember reaching toward my grandmother and how she recoiled at my touch, her expression going queasy: "Your hands are so cold!" My mouth stayed chalk dry and my tongue white.

I was diagnosed at twenty-six with a hereditary form of colon cancer that can also create primary tumors elsewhere in the body. In my case, in addition to the colon tumors, the doctors found a sarcoma in the right wing of my pelvic crest. I was assigned a genetic counselor at New York University's medical center, who explained to my family, nervously clustered in her office, that the syndrome is caused by a mutation somewhere within one of my "mismatch repair" genes that normally function to fix any broken rungs on the ladder of the double helix as it replicates.

Before the diagnosis, I was a graduate student in poetry at NYU. For my classmates and me, the pursuit of poetry was a total immersion, as consuming as training for the Olympic swim team. Even during the moments when I was out of the waters of poetry...

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