By Melanie Dale
@melanierdale 

“Ah! Hi!” I squeal as my fingers trace the wiry hair springing from the part between my chemo curls. I peer at it in the mirror to make sure it’s really what I think it is and not just a trick of the light.

My first gray hair. “You are welcome here. I am not afraid of you,” I say, patting it with my index finger.

I pull away from the mirror, the bathroom tilts around me, and I grab the counter. Some parts of aging are easier than others. The gray hair is welcome. The dizziness is not.

I’ve been dizzy since last summer, when I started having weird bouts of vertigo, where everything around me would swirl and a swishing sound inside my head would pulse like a heartbeat at a neonatal sonogram. I went to my oncologist and ENT and neurologist and physical therapist, all the –ists for putting Humpty Dumpty back together. 

I walk about four miles most days, catching up with a friend, solving the world’s problems. I first noticed the dizziness back in the woods, where I turned to look at my friend and the wide path suddenly seemed too narrow. Green leaves spun around me. Was I floating above the path or possibly lying down on it, or did God suddenly spin the globe fast like a toy top on a table? 

These episodes started happening daily, sometimes multiple times, sometimes lasting for hours. As if the dizziness wasn’t bad enough, directly following it, I felt nauseous, like I’d just gotten off a terrible ride at Six Flags.

As a cancer person (I hate to say “survivor,” because it feels like I’m done, and one thing I will never be is done. I will be beating this for the rest of my life, with every pill and trip to the doctor. Maybe I’m a cancer survivalist? One who is currently working on surviving cancer yet has no real control over it.) Weird stuff often prompts me to wonder if the cancer has migrated elsewhere. Did the chemo miss something and now I have brain cancer? My oncologist ordered me a scan. Scans are great if you like that triggering feeling of being right back where you were when you got the first bad scan. I assume I’m fine, then I remember that time I assumed I was fine and everything was very, very not fine. 

My scan was normal. Yay for no new cancer but now I got to meet all these new specialists to figure out what was going on, ultimately landing at a physical therapist Michigander who tortures me with needles and weights in his Lions hoodie.

I feel a lot better. 

The dizziness has abated enough to ponder its timing and exact grand meaning out of my jag in the blender of middle age. This physical dizziness is like the emotional dizziness I feel as I enter the next chapter of my life, one with grownish kids and no one to carpool and a body that skipped to the front of the menopause line and aged twenty years in two. 

It came suddenly. One kid got married and moved away and another got their license and another changed schools and all of a sudden I have no one to drive anywhere and hours of new time.

I got a job at a bookstore.
I finished yoga teacher training.
My house is quiet.
My husband hugs me and no one tries to wiggle between us. 
This makes me both happy and sad.

It’s not regret, per se, because I wouldn’t or couldn’t have done anything differently. There’s a hollow feeling creeping up my chest and lodging in my throat like a lump I can’t swallow. Childhood is over, teen years are tough, and this ever-present loneliness clings to the bottom of my scuffed slippers, dragging around the house wherever I go. Life is busy and full and for the first time in literal years, we don’t have figural fires in need of putting out. You couldn’t pay me to go backward but the relentless forwardness has me grabbing for a railing for balance and finding none. 

I’m “starting a new chapter.” No one tells you there’s stillness within the page turn, like a roller coaster dangling over the big hill before it plunges, twists, and loops to the next one. 

I’m frantic in the moment dangling between the chapters. What if I drop the book? What if there is no chapter waiting on the next page? What if my story ends here? What if I am the sum of my kids and when they don’t need me anymore I fade into nothingness?

My fingers tremble, and I grip the page I’ve finished. I lift and feel the velvety edge of the paper. If I turn too fast, the edge will cut my skin. If I rush the page turn, I’ll bleed. I carefully move the page from right to left. It lands on the first part of my book with heaviness. I imagine I hear a gong sound, reverberating through my body. 

Gong, childhood. Gone, childhood.

Gong, crone. Alone.

My dizziness dispels but life still spins around me, suddenly foreign. Everything changed in a blink and I’m still catching up, processing the transition.

I’m alive. Life moved on around me. I have old tampons in the bathroom and haven’t had a period since 2021. Do tampons expire? Why have I left them there? Menstruating guests? Or in case my ovaries spontaneously grow back?

My own metamorphosis reminds me of when the kids were little and grew so quickly I couldn’t keep up. Evie was stretching on 2T socks when her foot was two sizes bigger. Elliott’s joggers became capris. Like plants grown too big for their pots. 

I see the new chapter ahead, and I’m nervous to keep going. I’m torn between laying down the book or skipping to see how it ends. But neither are options, of course, because it’s not a book, it’s a life, and the only way forward is through.

Melanie Dale is the author of four books, Women Are Scary, It’s Not Fair, Infreakinfertility, and Calm the H*ck Down. She’s a writer for the TV series Creepshow, a monthly contributor for Coffee + Crumbs, and her essays are published in The Magic of Motherhood. She has appeared on Good Morning America and has been featured in articles in Cosmopolitan, Real Simple, The Bump, Working Mother, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the Los Angeles Times. To get out of the office, she spent the last few years shambling about as various zombies on The Walking Dead. She and her husband live in the Atlanta area with three kids from three different continents and an anxious Maltipoo named Khaleesi.

Photo by Jennifer Floyd.