Despair burned in me, writes 'Vagina Monologues' author

Editor’s note: Tony award-winning playwright Eve Ensler is best known for Vagina Monologues, a dramatic performance that has run to packed houses all over the world. She has also campaigned to raise awareness about the plight of women in the Congo who suffer unimaginable violence. In 2010, Ensler was diagnosed with uterine cancer. On the heels of this diagnosis came cancer of the liver and the colon. In the Body of the World is Ensler’s memoir of battling cancer, looking back upon her life and being anchored by the experiences she’s had thanks to the people in the Congo. She likens the book to “a CAT scan”, “a roving examination capturing images, experiences, ideas and memories, all of which began in my body”. In this chapter, titled “A Burning Meditation on Love”, she talks about how cancer helped her understand the nature of love. There is something about the exhaustion of being poisoned, of your body fighting off the attack or just surviving the attack. There is something about being clutched, clenched, chemoed that is so deeply strenuous and catastrophic that it takes you to a mystical place where you are so deeply inside your body, inside the inside of the cavern that is your body, so deep inside that you scrape the bottom of the world. That is where I began this burning meditation on love. I had been adored as a child and despised. I had been worshipped and desecrated. I knew nothing of love that was not based on conditions, love that did not involve living up to certain unrealizable expectations. My father’s heart had turned so cold that a week before he passed, in his delirious state, he told my mother to strike me from his will. (I was never clear why she told me this.) Then he told her to remember that I was a liar and that nothing I ever said could be trusted. When years later, I did the hardest thing I have ever done and went to see my mother by the sea to tell her my father had sexually molested me, she said she never would have believed me if he hadn’t told her that. Love was something you succeeded or failed at. It was like a corporate activity. You won or lost. People loved you and then they didn’t. As with trees, I had missed the point. The men I, in theory, had loved and who, in theory, had loved me had all disappeared. After years of involvement, not one found his way to my loft during those long burning months. I received a two line e-mail from my first husband of fifteen years, a card from a partner of thirteen years, and no word from another lover of equal duration. Later I heard he was insulted that I had not reached out to tell him I had cancer. No blame, just the facts. I had failed at love or at the story I had bought about love. As I rode my burning body down to the bottom of the world, I passed through the ghosts and glories of those love affairs — hideous moments and tender ones. Honestly, not much remained. No resentments, no longings. And that’s what was most painful — to think that at fifty-six I had come to this: no lover, no mate, and no nurturing memories. Despair burned in me. There were days when the leaves of my romantic failings made a bonfire inside me. The story I had been living about love was now clearly over. The landscape was charred. There was no way forward or back. [caption id=“attachment_759001” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Eve Ensler in this file photo.Image credit: Brigitte Lacombe[/caption] While this fire raged in me, some other alchemic dance that I could not even recognize was happening around me. It was MC cooking me soft-boiled eggs at 5:00 am to calm my stomach, Amy who I hardly knew stopping by unexpectedly to rub my feet, Susan appearing in my hospital room, my son sleeping on my couch, Nico coming from Italy for an entire month and turning my loft into a summer ashram, Nico shaving my head with a pink Bic razor, Carole sending me weekly boxes of silky pajamas, Jennifer walking me through the dark nights of the infection, Donna spoonfeeding me soup in the wretched Sloan-Kettering, Stephen coming from Canada to take me to lunch and pretending I looked good when I was green, Michele coming on Sundays to keep me sober, Avi and Naomi showing up with pajamas and Bolivian quinoa, Cecile flying in for the weekend, Jane arriving with hippie jewelry from Woodstock, beloved Paula M finding her way to my hospital room for my birthday, Coco packing my suitcase the night before I went to see my mother, Purva scoring me pot, Judy — who I have known since I was four — and her daughter, Molly, my goddaughter, tag teaming me on some of the roughest nights, Kim sending me daily poems that seemed to arrive at the exact moment I needed them, Paula Jo photographing me naked with bags, the Sri Lankan girls sending a box of homemade cards, Mark walking with me into meditations on death, Bassia making me borscht. It was Pat contacting Dr. Deb and getting me into the Mayo Clinic, Laura and Elizabeth making me laugh, Urv making me dal. It was Lu showing up regularly with DVDs, and Toast, it was Toast with the devotion of Kent in King Lear, who gently kept me engaged and fighting. Always there. Never wavering. Never complaining. This daily subtle, simple gathering of kindnesses, stretched out across the chemo days and months was, in fact, love. Love. Why hadn’t I known this was love? I was always reaching for love, but it turns out love doesn’t involve reaching. I was always dreaming of the big love, the ultimate love, the love that would sweep me off my feet or “break open the hard shell of my lesser self ” (Daisaku Ikeda). The love that would bring on my surrender. The love that would inspire me to give everything. As I lay there, it occurred to me that while I had been dreaming of this big love, this ultimate love, I had, without realizing it, been giving and receiving love for most of my life. As with the trees that were right in front of me, I had been unable to value what sustained me, fed me, and gave me plea sure. And as with the trees, I was so busy waiting for and imagining and reaching and dreaming and preparing for this huge big love that I had totally missed the beauty and perfection of the soft- boiled eggs and Bolivian quinoa. So much of life, it seems to me, is the framing and naming of things. I had been so busy creating a future of love that I never identified the life I was living as the life of love, because up until then I had never felt entitled enough or free enough or, honestly, brave enough to embrace my own narrative. Ironically, I had gone ahead and created the life I secretly must have wanted, but it had to be covert and off the record. Chemo was burning away the wrapper and suddenly I was in my version of life. Thus began the ecstasy — the joy, the pure joy of a spiritual pirate who finds the secret treasure. [caption id=“attachment_759025” align=“alignright” width=“380”] Book of Eve Ensler’s ‘In the body of the world.’[/caption] I had always found the idea that we were meant to love only one person problematic. So forced. When I was younger, the word monogamy annoyed and terrified me. I refused to include it in my first and only marriage vows. I knew I was marrying a serial womanizer, so it seemed pointless, but also I was the one who had chosen a man who was incapable of fidelity. This relaxed something in me, took off the pressure. I was horrified at the idea of having sex with one person for the rest of my life. Now I see my fear was not about sex. It was about being caught, determined, lined up. It was about being cornered in the love stall. It was about packaged love, couple love, dead- and- done-with-permanently-in-the-house-with- the-children love. About love that screamed isolation and church and control. That screamed, “Care about your own, protect your lot.” About parsed- out love and regulated love and prevented love. I am not against two people loving each other, please understand — only the elevation of this love as the highest expression of love. Maybe love comes to some of us differently. Maybe we love our women friends as deeply or humanity as deeply. I am happy for those who find one person to satisfy their need to love. That has not been my story. I have not loved one man or one woman. In the same way I have not wanted MY child. I have loved. That energy that propelled me around the planet. I have loved some immediately and for a short time and others slowly and forever. I could not say that the men I ended up living with or sleeping with were more important loves. Those loves went on longer, in a more organized, committed, daily way. That was a good thing and not a good thing. Love is ever expanding and so it needs space, air, movement, freedom. I find I am much more loving when I have not made agreements about how I will love. It’s like being forced to buy presents at Christmas — I do much better when I see something that reminds me of someone or when I feel a love rush and match it with a gift. I have been afraid to write about this or even to admit it to myself. This is the way I love. I have no idea where it will lead me. What I do know is that when I am with the women of the Congo, of Bukavu, of Shabunda, of Bunyakiri, of Goma, I know love. I love Jeanne and Alfonsine and Alisa, I love Christine and Dr Mukwege. I love the women on Essence Road who walk with two-hundred-pound sacks tied to their foreheads. I love the women who sell charcoal and fish on the open road and who dress in starched panges, so colorful they bring on the morning. I love the way they move and shout out and weep in sorrow. This is the big love, the ultimate love. It has nothing to do with marriage or ownership or having or consuming. It is about showing up and not forgetting, about keeping promises, about giving everything and losing everything. No one is mine. No Dr. Mukwege. No Christine. No women. They will never be mine. They were not meant to be mine. The world has done that already — possessed the Congo and pillaged her and dominated her and robbed her of agency and destiny. That is not love. That is possession, occupation. Love is something else, something rising and contagious and surprising. It isn’t aware of itself. It isn’t keeping track. It isn’t something you sign for. It’s endless and generous and enveloping. It’s in the drums, in the voices, in the bodies of the wounded made suddenly whole, by the music, by each other, dancing. From In the Body of the World, by Eve Ensler. Published with permission of Random House India.