Ode to Shampoo

May is National Poetry Month and I continue to be fascinated by the power of words. The past year has been chock full of words for me; words like “goodbye” and “write” are ones that I have uttered thousands of times before, but this year they took on all new meaning. When you combine all my words this year, spoken, heard and written, they mix together to create a pot of alphabet soup where “heartache,” “healing” and “liberation” rise to float on top of the bowl. I wonder what next year’s broth will say.

BEAUTIFUL Soup, so rich and green,
Waiting in a hot tureen!
Who for such dainties would not stoop?
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup! (Lewis Carroll)

Of all the words I heard yesterday, the best by far was, “Shampoo!” uttered by Diana D’Iorio. My dear friend, Diana, was rear-ended in her car late last summer. Taken to the hospital as a precaution, she waited to hear “whiplash,” but she heard another terribly powerful word instead. She heard, “cancer.”

Darling, all night
I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
The sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss. (Sylvia Plath)

Diana is so dear to me. She has a brilliant wit, a generous heart and a Doberman Pincher named, “the lovely Miss Jasmine.” She has also been hanging out on the oncology ward of the University of Pennsylvania Hospital for the past eight months. Sometimes, I’m lucky enough to hang with her, and in November, as her hair began to fall out into her food, I went to shave the rest of it off for her.
There have been lots of words written about the long hard winter, but they cannot describe Diana’s season of survival. She watched a roommate named Mildred fade away and die, she endured regular bone marrow biopsies, and she contracted shingles to add to her discomfort. Through it all, Diana kept smiling and sleeping in her blue monkey sheets.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep. (Robert Frost)

But then, as the crocuses appeared here in the east, we were visiting Diana’s doctor and we heard yet another word. We heard, “remission.” What a beautifully powerful word.

Diana has good days and bad ones. The massive amounts of chemotherapy will linger inside her system for awhile and her energy levels still disappoint her. But yesterday, when my cell phone rang, I put it to my ear to hear Diana’s voice say these words, “Guess what? Guess what? I need to buy shampoo! I look a little like Dame Judi Dench, but I still need to buy shampoo! Woo hoo!”

So, in honor of poetry month, I have composed a bit of verse myself (ahem):

Cleansing, shining, liquid goo
The wonderful stuff we call shampoo
Woo hoo! Woo hoo!
Look what God can do