Marrow by Elizabeth Lesser Page B

mother.
    â€œWow,” they whisper back.
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    field notes • march 1
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    my 3 sisters were tested for the possibility of being a match for a donor stem cell transplant. the possibility of this happening was low—25%. each sister had to scrape her inner mouth cheek with a tongue blade, and send that sample off to a lab. a sibling donor’s cells have a betterchance of engrafting and being accepted into one’s bloodstream and marrow than a non-family member’s. the nurse at dartmouth called me today with the news that liz and i match 10/10. a perfect match. i felt my spirits notch up on the hope scale. but i’m suspicious of hope. it has fooled me before, and i don’t even know what i’m hoping for anyway. a year? 2 years? a cure? i’m afraid to read the statistics; afraid not to. afraid to hope; afraid not to. liz called me from vacation. i told her i was afraid to hope. so she told me a greek myth about the spirit of hope. everytime i talk to her she quotes walt whitman or talks about a greek god. i think she’s turning into our mother. or maybe i just need a mother now.

ELPIS
    IN GREEK MYTHOLOGY HOPE WAS a spirit known as Elpis. She and other gods and spirits were kept in a jar by Zeus and entrusted into the care of the first woman, Pandora. Overcome by curiosity, Pandora opened the vessel. She lifted the lid, and out rushed the gods and spirits. The gods soared into the sky, abandoned the mortals, and went back to Mount Olympus. But the evil spirits remained on earth. Envy, toil, hate, disease, and all of their cranky and cruel cohort flew to the four corners of the world. Realizing what was happening, Pandora hastened to close the container. Too late! All had escaped, except for one. Hiding in the vessel was Elpis . . . hope. It is said that Elpis remained in the jar to help human beings now that evil had been unleashed. Whenever the world seemed too much to bear, we humans could open the lid and call on Elpis for faith and optimism.
    I call Maggie from the porch of our little cottage overlooking the Caribbean Sea. I expect to hear a more hopeful tone in her voice since the last time we spoke in the chemo suite. I know she has heard from the nurse that our marrow matches and transplant is now possible.
    â€œIs this Maggie-Liz?” I say into the phone. We’ll end up using our combined blood-sister name all through the transplant process, but at the moment she’s in no mood for lighthearted banter. She’snot ready to sign on for the transplant, she says. She’s not sure she can bear to continue the treatment. Her hair is falling out. She’s constantly nauseated and can’t eat. Her fingers feel numb. She’s lost her fighting spirit, she says. Why keep fighting when all signs point to defeat? Why hope? Hope only makes it worse when things fall apart.
    â€œAnd they will fall apart again,” she says. “I’m sorry to sound so morose, Liz.”
    I tell her the story of Elpis. I tell her how the Greeks depicted hope as a young woman carrying flowers in her arms. Elpis was said to bear the energy of spring, of green sap rising in the veins of trees, of the smell of rain on dry earth. Her opposite, Moros, spirit of hopelessness and doom, was a hunched man cloaked in black.
    â€œWho do you want to hang around with?” I say into the phone. “A girl with flowers, or a really depressed guy named Moros?”
    â€œYou know I love flowers,” Maggie says. “But I hate when people tell me to have hope. As if everything’s going to be OK if I just have a positive attitude.”
    â€œBut that’s not what hope is about. It’s not about everything turning out OK. It’s about being OK with whatever happens.”
    â€œEasy for you to say.”
    I have noticed how quickly Maggie angers when anyone glosses over the rigors of the transplant and goes straight to its potential success. I think she feels abandoned