The Unremarkable Heart

she could confide her fears. June announced it in a school-wide email. Her hand was steady as she moused over to the icon showing a pencil hovering over a piece of yellow paper. Compose. Send to all. No salutation. No tears. No quibbling. She was fifty-eight years old, would not live to see fifty-nine, but a sentence of death was not a license to lose her dignity.
    ‘You should all know that I have inoperable stage four lung cancer.’
    The first thing people asked was, Are you a smoker? Leave it to June to get the sort of disease that had a qualifier, where strangers judged you for bringing about your own illness. And even when June told them no, that she had never smoked, never tried a cigarette or even thought about it, there was a glassy look to their eyes. Disbelief. Pity. Of course she’d brought this on herself. Of course she was lying. Delusional. Stubborn. Crazy.
    It was all so eerily similar to what had come before that by the end of the day, June found herself laughing so long and so hard that she’d coughed blood onto her blouse. And then the horrified looks had replaced the pity, and she was back in those dark days when her only comfort was the thought that the sun would rise and set, the years would go by, and eventually, she would die, her shame taken with her to the grave.
    Irony , June thought now. An incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs.
    The lung cancer had quickly metastasized. First her liver, which gave her an alarming, yellowish pallor, then her bones, so brittle that she was reminded of angelhair pasta before you put it into a pot of boiling water. And now her brain, the last thing that she could truly call her own. All cancerous. All riddled with tumors, cells multiplying faster than the palliative radiation and chemotherapy could keep up with.
    The doctor, an impossibly young man with a smattering of acne on his chin, had said, ‘The metastasis are quite pronounced.’
    ‘Metastases,’ June had corrected, thinking she could not even have the luxury of dying without having to correct the English of someone who should clearly know better.
    ‘Five months.’ He’d scribbled something in her chart before he closed it. ‘Six if you’re lucky.’
    Oh, how lucky June was to have this extra time.
    The tumors in her brain weren’t impinging on anything useful. Not yet, at least, so it would seem not ever. This morning, she imagined them as similar to the shape of a lima bean, with tiny, round bottoms that fit puzzle-like into curving gray matter. Her speech was often slurred, but the gift of brain cancer was that oftentimes she could not hear her own voice. Memory was an issue, though maybe not. She could be paranoid. That was a common side-effect to the myriad of medications she ingested.
    Short term memory loss. Palsy. Dry mouth. Leaky bowels.
    Her breathing was borderline suffocation, the shallow gulps bringing a wheezing death rattle from her chest. She could no longer sit up unaided. Her skin was cold, the constant temperature of a refrigerator’s vegetable crisper and, in keeping with the metaphor, the texture, once smooth and even, was now entirely wilted.
    In the early days of her diagnosis, she’d had so many questions about her impending death, but could find no one to answer them. There were plenty of tracts in the doctor’s office on keeping a good attitude, eating macrobiotic diets and making your way back to Jesus, but June could find nothing that spoke frankly on the actual act of death itself. There must have been information online, but if June wanted to read endless paragraphs of poor-me navel-gazing, she could walk down to the reading lab and start grading creative writing assignments. Besides, she could not overcome her long-held belief that the internet was designed to render human beings functionally retarded.
    Years ago, when June had gallbladder, she had talked to other patients about what to expect. How long was the recovery? Was it worth it? Did it take care of the problem?
    There was no one to talk with this time. You could not ask someone, What was it like when you died?
    ‘It’s different for everyone,’ a nurse had said, and June, still full of enough life to feel the injustice of her situation, had said, ‘That’s bullshit.’
    Bullshit, she had said. Bullshit to a perfect stranger.
    Five years ago, the air conditioner at the house had finally given up the ghost, and the repairman, a former student of June’s who seemed