Mary and Janice This is a pic of me n Janice yesterday. Janice is the best gf on the planet. It’s that simple, folks. Janice and Stuart took me out to celebrate the removal of the drains. They windsurfed with the incomparable pedagogical assistance of Dr. JB. My friend B came along, and D and B from work were there too. Kewl. We drank beer – I drank a LOT of beer. I even called Sz when we got home and made her talk to me despite the fact that I was quite plastered and incomprehensible.  My friend D told me that my chest was “flat as a board, girlfriend”. And boy howdy is he ever right. It is flat as a board. Which is kind of ok. I wasn’t offended. The afternoon was almost normal. What a concept. I have never aspired to “normal” but yesterday, normal was quite the accomplishment. I love my friends. It’s that simple. Yay you!!!!

So how do friendships survive the exceptional stress of cancer? In the short time that I have been living with cancer, I have been hyper aware of: (a) the difficulty of talking with friends about cancer, (b) negotiating the terrain of friendship, and (c) transforming and recasting the shape and the content of relationships given the requirements imposed by this bizarre, terrifying and intensely weird condition in which I have found myself.

I really like British psychoanalyst DW Winnicott’s construct of the “good enough” mother. The loving caregiver, according to Winnicott, creates a holding space for the child that takes her own inevitable failure into account. The “good enough” mother trusts the child to be able to hold herself together across the necessary space of Otherness that separates them one from the other. And the same could be said of friends.

My encounters with cancer have cast a very bright and somewhat brutal light on my friendships and it is only the relationships that are good enough that will endure here, in this harsh and unforgiving climate. So what is a good enough friend? I think that on the whole, those folks who trust themselves, and me, enough to bear witness to what is happening and who can freely acknowledge their own fears and discomforts around cancer, extreme surgery and the like — those are the relationships that are withstanding this extraordinary time.

The good enough friend knows that s/he can’t take my cancer away, and also that I am going to be afraid, in pain and discomfort, and that I will have to endure a hell of a lot of institutionally defined practices and settings – doctor’s offices, tests, the Cancer Agency and on and on and on — spaces of governmentality to which I have a particularly well honed allergy. S/he knows that s/he can’t step into this situation and make it all better. At the same time, there s/he is, going through the experience with me, laughing about it, asking questions, and basically, not pretending that “all’s well that ends well in the best of all possible worlds”.

I love the folks who phone me up and pepper me with questions because they have been reading about breast cancer, or thinking about something I said the other day about my diagnosis, or they are really afraid about something that they don’t understand and they just want to clear up a misunderstanding. I think it’s awesome when someone volunteers to go with me to something really gross and freaky, like when I had to have radioactive dye injected into one breast and it hurt like hell and I knew it was going to hurt ahead of time so I was unusually freaked out.

When I told one of my neighbours, J, about the cancer, she just cried with me and didn’t say a whole hell of a lot, except that she would bring me meals. We both cried, and then we were laughing about how finally I would be able to get rid of all those bras that I can’t stand to wear, and we were done. For that time, that day.

The good enough friend is tough enough to hear what something is actually like without feeling the need to alter my narrative to fit her own tolerance for pain and discomfort. When s/he asks me how I am doing, s/he wants to know, really, how things are going, knowing full well that they may not be going well at all.

Some people can’t bear to hear the truth and they have really well honed defenses against reality. One of the people I know couldn’t come to visit without bringing her girlfriend along to act as a buffer. Someone else in my social network hasn’t talked to me once since the diagnosis, and will only phone my girlfriend, so that he never has to actually talk to me. Other folks immediately proffer advice as a way of fending off the intrusion of the immediate and the Real.

It’s hard to sustain a good enough friendship under these conditions. It’s going to be a fragile enterprise. There will be system failures, bugs and crashes. Inevitable failure — that is Winnicott’s contribution to our understanding of how to give care. And it is an amazing thing to navigate the seas of life in this storm of incalculable risk and disorientation and to see how incredibly courageous people can be, and how very generous and kind. That’s good enough for me.