The Imposter |
Issue 17
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December 2023
I wonder if it is possible for someone to feel unworthy of their cancer. This has crossed my mind during the last eight months of unemployment, which have begun to feel like involuntary retirement. This phenomenon has come to the fore over the last few decades, as ageism, technology, severe recessions, and a pandemic have forced many people out of their jobs before age 65. The media frames it as people who “left the workforce” as if the majority had the choice. That might be true, but not for me. My three-quarters of a year felt like another pandemic lockdown, having to sit at home and job search, cut back on expenses, tap my retirement savings, and have too much time to view my neighbor across the street fighting stage four ovarian cancer. Seeing her chauffeured to her daily treatments, hat covering hair loss, in addition to my wife schlepping to her job while I sit on my ass, are more than enough reasons for my imposter syndrome. My neighbor, whom I’ll call Anne, has been fighting her cancer battle for four years, and here is where I’m supposed to say that she is a beautiful and funny, vivacious person with so much life ahead of her. Yes, but reality includes loud, nosy, and talkative. She is a person like you or me, who, if we’re very fortunate in this life, is tangled in a web of love and relationships that make her human and living a worthwhile pursuit. I have had to remind myself of that repeatedly in the current cultural environment, where people are conveniently boiled down to the ‘us and them’ bubbles we build to shelter us from our own insignificance. This is the precipice I have danced along in my unemployment. I have discovered that my potential forced retirement is the inverse of the Socratic aphorism that ‘an unexamined life is not worth living.’ The attitude one can maintain is the key to whether that is an inspiration to live, or its opposite, when one of the elements of one’s purpose is forcibly removed. Anne started her battle about the same time I started living with the knowledge that I had chronic lymphocytic leukemia. She was already in the late stage and first had chemo, then surgery to remove the proverbial pound of flesh. It left her cancer-free until now, but at only 63 years old, she is relying on a colostomy bag. Anne is only two years older than I am, and I am fortunate to see an oncologist only twice a year. CLL is one of the slowest-moving cancers, and I am in the early stage, with a normal white blood cell count. I have come to think of cancer, along with heart disease, as the maladies of the working class: her husband has CLL, worse than mine, but in remission, and my father had it. On my dad’s side of the family, my grandfather died of a brain tumor. He and my father were both plumbers, and Anne’s husband was a corrections officer for thirty years, who had a quadruple bypass, like my father. My master’s degree freed me from the working class, but not the curse of its diseases. However, ageism is another more pernicious plague at play, one infecting the health that never really affected plumbers. I lost my previous job, where I had been for five years, to budget cuts, and I knew being sixty meant a prolonged search for new employment at the very least. I have minimal savings and not enough in my investment plan for a long retirement. Having cancer makes medical benefits more critical, compounded by the fact that my wife, an independent contractor, and son, just out of college, relied on them as well. Cobra for my previous plan would have meant at least $5,000 a month, about what my monthly bills cost me. I settled on a cheaper plan through our state exchange ($1,600 a month), but it hardly covers anything. I pray I don’t need another hospital stay like I did two years ago for a clot in my leg that cost the insurance company about $60,000 for three days and myriad tests. Greater chances for expensive health issues after a certain age, and thus insurance rates, is one of the symptoms of ageism. Still two years away from the minimum age for social security, and with only a month and a half of severance, I thought ‘So this is why there are so many homeless people in this country.’ The prolonged time away from work gave me a feel for how a retirement funk can easily fall into place, sleep in, wake, job search, procrastinate, lunch, job search, procrastinate with snack, then gym, TV or book, and bed. During that time, my phone’s weekly app report showed that I averaged about 12 hours on social media and only half that on my library app. I was fortunate to average up to four or five interviews per week, but didn’t get close to that many times. I am grateful for all of them as, at the very least, they aided with marriage politics when my wife would get home from a bad day at work and see me in front of the computer chatting. Chalk it up to age, but I didn’t remember the many hoops one has to jump through to secure a director-level position. The process can take about three months for one job, with HR, juggling schedules for group chats, executive-level meetings, and, if lucky, a final site visit that takes about half a day. Add additional steps if you are going through a recruiter or the employer requires you to take a test or complete a project. At any stage, you may never hear from them again. I began to get a feel for why some people opt for early retirement. Social media and watching my neighbor’s fight to live have started to wear on my psyche. It is an unfortunate truism that the world is going to shit, and I have had too much of the kaleidoscope of vanity, hubris, and op-eds to escape, with so much media and time. These past few months have shown me that everything and everyone is ‘extreme’ and the ‘greatest of all time (GOAT)’s arguments or attainments will be the ruin of civilization. My God, am I now what awaits me in retirement? Unfortunately, mine won’t include world travel, as other, more prudent, perhaps luckier, individuals enjoy. Here is the limbo level I have reached, being unoccupied for too long: I encountered a prepper on TikTok and, mistakenly, watched a few of his videos. Then I imagined the scene in Independence Day where the idiots dancing on the rooftop mistake it for the Age of Aquarius before being blasted by the aliens. I thought to myself that I would rather be dancing around a maypole at ground zero with morons when the apocalypse happens than experience the survivalist chaos of its aftermath. For a shameful moment, I almost envied Anne. One thing that boosts my resolve to move forward is that I vowed when first diagnosed with CLL not to let it be the foundation of self-pity that was the demise of my father. He succumbed at age 62. (I’m now 10 months away from that birthday.) He lived with it for a decade or more, but didn’t take care of himself, and immediately quit work once diagnosed in his late 40s, only to sit around commiserating all the time. I remember him cancelling any plans we made because he had his fingers on his lymph nodes 24/7, cowering in his Bronx apartment anytime he thought one of them enlarged the slightest bit. That’s not me. I did martial arts for 20 years, and once I finished with that, I have biked, kayaked, and hiked ever since. I’ll let my oncologist tell me when I have to worry. I think my father is the life lesson that has led to a determination not to retire from life. That, and every day out of my window, I see someone half my father’s size on her way to being pumped full of poison to survive. About four months into unemployment, my resolve to keep looking began to crumble a bit. I watched every tutorial LinkedIn and FlexJobs offered for job seekers on how to answer individual interview questions and present myself. One video on combating ageism gave me a few pointers that were helpful, though I took it a step further. The first major recommendation I followed was to show no more than 15 years of experience on my resume or social media. Even the font, format, and language used can date you. So, I changed all that, and even replaced my LinkedIn portrait with one of me kayaking on choppy seas to indicate physical rigor. However, I also changed my appearance. I had vowed never to do this having seen too many people over the years with shoe polish dye jobs, bad toupees or worse. My compromise was to shave my mustache and goatee which I had for 30 years. Granted it was white, but it was like removing a body part. I was pleased to hear that it made me look younger. However, I despised the weak narrow chin and the CLL enhanced lymph nodes in my neck the beard removal laid bare. At this point, I should share something about the career I want to get back to and probably can’t retire from after thirty years. Once upon a time, I published a personal essay somewhere with the first line, “I shoveled shit and shook hands with a Rockefeller.” If that is not obvious enough about its theme, let me add that I am a fundraiser, working for nonprofits, mostly cultural and educational institutions, and have done everything from writing grants to individual giving. Like most people in this field, I fell into it. My route was as an English major who wanted to write for a living and found proposals an interesting challenge. I have since accumulated experience in many facets of the field that have helped me to reach management level and at least get several interviews a week during my current unemployment. It might also help that I am a Navy veteran and first-generation college student who avoided the fates of his siblings from a broken working-class family. My last position was at a university where I had learned planned giving, which I thought would cushion me against ageism. Planned giving is asking mostly older donors to support the institution through their wills or other noncash assets. My protection, I thought, was that a donor of a certain age or life stage would connect better with a fundraiser, me, of a similar generation, which is mostly true in that field. The downside is that a beneficiary does not receive the actual money until after death and that could be decades. This doesn’t pay the bills now, especially for an institution like my former employer that had to cut jobs, majors, and its athletics program just to survive the pandemic. This gives you an idea why they made the decision to boot an older director to fund two younger and cheaper fundraisers. So, there I was, nobody special in the harsh reality of working life, like so many others who thought it would never happen to them. The writer in me should have jumped for joy at the prospect of having the time for the novel I should have always wanted to write. It would definitely be a great hobby to occupy a retiree, right? These past few months have only produced this essay. Don’t pity me though as I never bought into the great the pipe dream of becoming the Great American Novelist that justifies the existence of creative writing programs polluting the college landscape. I enrolled in one once which brought to mind the biblical writer of Ecclesiastes who says, “all is vanity and striving after wind.” No, I am quite proud that I have raised millions of dollars for worthy causes through the written word. I also credit literature for helping to make me the humanist I try to be today and teaching me that the Great Books are not great because others tell you, but because you enjoy them. I also like to think that making a decent living through the application of craft connects me to my father and grandfather through more than just a predisposition to cancer. Among the many crazy or shameful thoughts I’ve had time for is whether Anne would trade places with me. That is only an assumption, as anyone might feel the same in her situation. New Year’s just passed, a holiday we have celebrated with Anne and other neighbors for twenty years. My wife and I spent it alone. I saw Anne’s son at the gym recently, and he cried and said that her treatments are only extending her life. Given the choices I could feel about her situation and mine, I wonder if impostor syndrome is the lesser of evils when schadenfreude, cynicism, or misanthropy become the scary but very real alternatives. How you feel about reading that is something that I don’t care about at this stage of my life. All that separates each one of us is where we stand on the scale of grit and privilege. You either receive pity or envy from those who look up or down at you. Where I failed in my forced retirement is in losing sight of the fact that love is the cure for what ails us, fatal or not. It’s the reason God is love, whether he exists or not. Now is the time where I can share the ‘what I’ve learned’ rant if you want, but none of its revelatory. First off, I know now why it annoys me less that some of the people I hike or kayak with react to every mundane wildlife encounter as if it were the second coming. Second, Zen happens to everyone when age forces you to treasure moments over years. Just remember that the caveat can happen to anyone at any age if cancer or some other debilitation is involved. Third, is accepting that catacombs are constructed with human skulls, every one of them forgotten, but each essential to holding up the structure. The final message is that there may be no god or hereafter, so walk through those catacombs with reverence and awe, and if you don’t possess those traits, allow your neighbor to teach you. There are many other lessons from much smarter minds, but these seem most important to me as I cheer on planned obsolescence, holding off the grim reaper. There is a postscript. I am most grateful and humbled that my story has a relatively “happy” ending, or beginning, if that is the ‘healthier’ perspective I should have emerging from more than half a year of sloth. It is now January, and I was let go last May, about the time Anne’s cancer returned. I will happily start a new position at another university in a week. A little less pay, and not as a director, which is okay, as ambition is less a part of my vocabulary. I was actually the finalist for two other jobs I had to decline. That was very validating, although I wondered whether it was my experience, how I interviewed, or that folks were rushing to fill openings with any warm body before year’s end. I hope that it’s the latter two points. (Ah, ‘Hope’ finally appears after three thousand words.) I also hope I have enough time to replenish my savings, get my head and house back in order, and somehow retire in a few years. My intent is to do so when eligible for full social security benefits, health or God willing. Now I must pause in my elation with the imperative of not letting busyness keep me from seeing Anne once again. December 2025 My wife just left to meet some of my other neighbors' wives for what has essentially been a parade of people entering and leaving Anne’s house to say their final goodbyes. When, or if I will be called with the husbands, I do not know. Nor do I know how I will react. My wife is tougher than I am, having seen both her parents on their deathbeds. I was removed from both of mine when they passed. It is three days before Christmas and two years since I first wrote about my imposter syndrome, being unemployed at the time, and daily watching my neighbor Anne get shuffled off to one of her many treatments or hospital stays. What’s happening in the present is the tragic beginning of the typical obit we see too many times in our lives, ‘the end of a brave fight against cancer.’ Fill in the time based on the person's type, stage, and hardiness. As I had mentioned previously, I have Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, and was diagnosed six years ago, about as long as Anne has fought stage four ovarian cancer. I do believe that I have never had to be treated, and that my numbers are all normal, because I am a hearty individual: 6’4”, 215 pounds, and physically active. My oncologist agrees. Anne, on the other hand, is maybe 5’5” and slight and never exercised. Where I am strong physically, she could run circles around me socially. I will confess to a bit of envy here, as I have, in the past, watched her and her husband head out on summer Saturday evenings, when I’m home with no plans, more often than I care to admit. Whenever we’ve gathered with her and other friends and neighbors, such as at block parties, she would make the rounds of all the houses, while I watched, hoping my next beer would give me the courage to talk to the person beside me. Ask me if I have a particularly fond memory of Anne to cherish, and I’ll struggle to find one. The fact is, she and I were always sheltered from any honest, face-to-face discussions by the context of couples’ nights out. There are five couples, and we have gotten together semi-regularly for dinners, Super Bowl parties, and New Year’s for the past 20-plus years. Some couples are closer than others. My wife and I are not as much. Anne and her husband got very close to one of the others after the tragic loss of their child about 15 years ago. I remember being similarly cowardly and muted at the time, and I have shamefully felt a bit of jealousy at the bond that they developed over time. I also wondered why Anne rarely invited my wife to the girls’ nights out, when her husband and I attended our weekly poker games. Whatever asshole I am, my wife certainly isn’t. At least she was invited tonight. Frankly, I never fit in, unlike my very social wife. When out for dinner with the couples, she would gab with the women while I mostly listened to the men. They watch sports, I read books; they golf, I kayak and hike; gay jokes are the locus of their humor, that part of my brain doesn’t always work. However, I do recollect an admittedly selfish memory of Anne. It was one Christmas, long before her diagnosis, when her husband gave her a waffle maker. They invited the neighbors over for breakfast that morning. I believe I was the only one who went as my wife was busy with preparations, and the other neighbors were away. Attending were Anne, her husband, and three adult children. It was one of the few times I made everyone laugh. Whether it was coffee or just a Christmas miracle, the humor side of my brain kicked in. Something about Colombian chocolate Anne had saved from a previous vacation, sitting in a basement freezer for years. I don’t remember the specific punchlines, but it brought joy to bring joy, with non-gay humor. I only wish I could do that now. So it is really not hard to guess why I sit here alone, jumping each time my phone beeps, dreading whether I will be next to join the parade, while spewing these words that I hope will magically turn cathartic. Truth be told, I don’t want to go because I am a coward, more afraid of making a fool of myself, not knowing what to say, than for the purpose of providing comfort to her and her family. Yes, I also fear death, and if Karma might make Anne’s present my future. I also know what that might cost. My wife recently did three different hospital stays in three months this year, not for cancer, thank God, and if not for health insurance, just one of her visits would have cost $300,000. The original mortgage on my house was $200,000. I can’t imagine what Anne’s battle must have cost after multiple surgeries, almost weekly hospital stays for infections or side effects, and emergency approved treatments to keep her alive. A funeral next. When I last wrote, I was going through the depression and other requisite feelings of obsolescence that an unemployed 60-year-old goes through. I’m now 63, at my new job two years, and have had one of the most successful years as a career fundraiser. From what I can tell, my boss loves me, and I get to work from home four days a week, and the benefits are great (thank God again—see hospital bill alluded to above). It being the Holidays, I am also off for the next two weeks, without having to take a vacation. Calling me grateful would be an understatement. I keep telling friends this is a career extender, which I desperately need, as I have to work until I am 70 to get full Social Security to afford whatever comes next for me. Right now, though, this is not so important. Confronted with my neighbor's impending death, I’m torn between whether I wish her to last through the Holidays or for her and her family to be at peace. I am also torn by whether I should be this confessional in such a public way. For the past 15 or more years, I have been a ‘successful’ writer, getting most of what I put to paper published within the literary periodical market. No offense to these worthy publications, but I am glad that my readership is probably in the tens; likewise, no offense to friends and family, but there is very little chance they will see my work unless I show them. Chances are, my family will either discover my work in the mounting library of anthologies on the bottom shelf of my desk after I die, or they will wind up by the curb like so much other detritus of life. I tried publishing Part One of this essay a year or two ago, and I am being much more open about the ugly who or what I am in the light of my neighbor's dying. Maybe that will lead to success. Like memes, once this stuff is out there, it never goes away. Let the world be the judge if I will be less of a coward exposing myself, or if I’m just another selfish prick saying ‘hey look at me,’ at the expense of a friend’s death. This certainly isn’t the definition of noble self sacrifice. My wife has just returned, and I regrettably find myself thanking God yet again that she didn’t call me over. Situations like this certainly put a spotlight on one’s selfishness and pettiness. The first is intrinsic, the second is developed. Like so many other things, when reminded of life’s transience, neither matters much right now. That includes the fact that Christmas Eve is the day after tomorrow. I envision going to church for the first time in a long time, for the comfort rather than the celebration. With my own family having been whittled down by parents and friends either dying or moving away, I’ve entered the time of life when this time of year is more about Auld Lang Syne, than it is about the hope the birth of Christ is supposed to mean. Though I do appreciate the feeling of the sacred it still brings. I pray that Anne is somehow experiencing something like it because, ultimately, that is why the story exists. With that hope, I pray that my prayers for Anne are efficacious. In my cowardly impotence, it is all I have. Two years ago it began with, God, if you’re there, heal her. Imagine the converts if you perform a miracle. Not interested? Okay, maybe have another emergency approved treatment to extend the quality and length of her life. That too doesn’t’ seem to be working anymore. All that’s left is the following: ease her pain, grant her a sense of peace, make your presence known to her. Actually, any one of these could actually work without a deity. Science tells us as much. You know, I almost think he should stay out of it, because if God is who says he is, then he, too, is no less impotent than I. Plus, my mind inevitably will go to the place where if he does actually heal Anne, then why not one of the kids who are paraded in front of the cameras this time of year by the myriad hospitals and charities asking for money to cure childhood cancer? And on and on thinking and praying fail the dying. I can hear Christmas carols in the other room, as my wife quietly eats her dinner in front of yet another Hallmark Holiday movie. Those are, for me, nothing more than maudlin commercialized snow globes made to drown the profound in the inane. Then again, who am I to judge? Whenever I hear ‘Oh Holy Night,’ I still sometimes envision myself singing it to the stars on a mountain top and get a bit weepy-eyed. Yet the reality is that I am more moved by the quiet of a frigid winter day hike, where the leafless trees bear the twisted beauty of their souls. Sometimes I think that the breeze is the proverbial ‘still small voice.’ Other times, I appreciate the nothingness of it: no people, no doctrine, no judgment. Quite the opposite of what Christ says, “where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them.’ What does Anne feel or see in this moment as she, according to my wife, wanes in and out of consciousness? Without that knowledge, us and our neighbors all have to confront the inevitable before us: the Holidays are changing. Though at this point in our lives, we are veterans of this reality. For years, we gathered for New Year's Eve parties at one neighbor’s house, until they moved away. Anne hosted Super Bowl parties until she couldn’t, and my wife and I held annual barbecues as part of the annual traditions until our kids outgrew them. In our own family, my wife and I have replaced our parents as the center of Holidays, and further dying, relocating, or, in my dysfunctional unit, the necessary ostracizing of certain leeching members, means Christmas is down to me, my wife, our son, and her loner brother and womanizing cousin. When not living vicariously through his latest arm-candy stories, the laughs come from me busting my son’s chops (such as when I texted him the Bristol Stool chart and said Santa got everything on his list), interrupted by our mutual eye-rolling at my wife sharing the same tired memories of her family's departed. Though my relationship with the deity is complicated, each night I read scripture, mostly for the comfort, sometimes for the sacred, and I consistently thank him for home, family, work, and health. Each of those essential pillars of life is diminishing in one form or another, both from the effects of time and my own choices, and my level of humility or gratitude is directly proportional to times like these. I’ve become a walking contradiction: a hypocritical misanthrope buoyed by cheerful cynicism. Now I understand where Krampus came from. This is the shelter I have built against caring what people think of me; however, I am grateful that I still have others whose opinions I do care about. For now, I am racing toward the catharsis of the final period of this paragraph, knowing nothing more than I started and wondering how I will once again confront loss. You are, of course, free to define your own image of me by the evidence I’ve presented here. Let’s be fair, though, you can’t see the tears in my eyes, nor will you witness when I finally find belonging in another upcoming parade of goodbyes. January 1, 2026—Postscript Happy New Year. Anne died. A beginning or an end? The answer is, yes. I’m writing this in the morning before her funeral, the Sunday after. I went to the gym instead of church, where working the heavy bag, a remnant of my martial arts days, seemed more therapeutic. I dread seeing her in a box with a mixture of a sense of loss, and I’m sure and fear of my own pending mortality. She was the glue that held our neighbor’s group together. Her husband is a wreck. He had to get a catheterization, the day after her death, adding to the myriad of stints already working to keep him upright. Forgive how this sounds, but he won’t last. I’ve seen it before with my father, more than 25 years ago. He died, a year younger than I am now, just three months after my stepmother, giving up on life, even with the pending birth of his first grandchild. Cause of death, acute co-dependency. Though admirably caring for her, Anne’s husband has been voluntarily wasting away alongside her. What sucks about the holidays this late in life is how death whittles them away. Where once we gathered at parents' and in-laws' with our young families, we now visit their graves to decorate with wreaths and miniature trees. A few weeks ago my wife and I engaged in this new tradition, visiting our parents at Calverton National Cemetery. She will go a few times a year. I don’t see the sense, but I acquiesced to Christmas. At her parents' tombstone, she tearfully related her own health struggles over the past year, almost succumbing to a double embolism because the cure(s) were worse than the disease. I held her and cried as well. After that, we visited my mom and stepfather, at whose site my wife asked if they were having fun playing cards or golfing with her parents in heaven. I parodied my youngest brother, who had lived with Mom on and off, and asked, “If you’re there, can I borrow twenty bucks?” My wife laughed. As I write this, I envision a conversation with our neighbors together on the way to Anne’s funeral, with the one who lost her son a decade and a half ago asking me if I believed in God at times like these. (They know I am the one-time byproduct of a Christian College.) My answer is that death is the perfect time for God, as he doesn’t seem to do anything for us in life. Of course, that conversation will never take place, but it does express my feelings right now. Nope, as I said before, a walk in the woods is more cathartic for me right now. In fact, two days before Anne passed, I went rock scrambling on icy bluffs in the Catskills. Nerve-wracking, yes, but exhilarating and life affirming when you are rewarded at the top with a view of snowy mountains and the sparkling skyline of Manhattan in the distance. It’s a cliché to call this a metaphor for life or death. Perhaps no more a cliché than thousands of years of collars and scholars trying to bracket everything into beginnings and endings. Those exist whether we want them or not. |
Donald R. Vogel is a fundraiser by profession, writer by aspiration, who lives in Long Island, New York with his wife and son. He holds a master’s degree in English from Stony Brook University and has published both fiction and nonfiction in several literary journals.
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