Like most people, I always thought of my identity as composed of many traits: teacher, gay, left-wing Democrat, atheist, left-handed, adventurous...  But probably the two most important were always what I did and whom I loved.

I've been asked many times whether I miss teaching.  In some ways, no, since the first year after I retired, I taught as an adjunct, and then I got the cancer diagnosis, which changed everything.  But in other ways, of course, it's been very hard to use the past tense tense in talking about my career.  It's much more natural to say, "I've been a teacher for 45 years" than "I was a teacher."  It's even harder to say I'm retired or I'm a retired teacher.  Retirement must be difficult not only because all your routines change, but because a part of your identity is, in some ways, lost.  I do have to point out, though, at this time of year when my colleagues are faced with piles of essays to grade and I've gotten e-mails complaining and forwarded articles with grading horror stories, that I have not one single essay to grade.  I'm not going to read one sentence about a character who suffers from an "edible complex" in our "doggy dog world."  I'll encounter no descriptions of "pre-Madonnas" (who would that be?).  No student will tell me that Hester Prynne suffers from low self-esteem.  Of course, I'll also never read again that essay that wows me and redeems the sighs (and laughs) that went with most of the others.

For a gay man, Tuesday was depressing as 61% of the voters in North Carolina approved Proposition One, a constitutional amendement defining marriage yet again as between only a man and a woman.  61%!  But when I think of what things were like in the 1950s when I was growing up or the 60s or even the 80s, where we are now is almost unbelievable.  Biden has been mocked for his comment that "Will and Grace" changed the landscape, but he's not far off.  There's the famous story of Justice Lewis Powell, saying to his (closeted) gay clerk that he regretted his decision in Bowers but that he had never known a gay person.  I'm sure, until I came out, that my parents would have said the same thing, although, after a moment's thought, admitting that the guy who ran the local theater was "a little queer" (my mother's words once, not really hateful, just the vocabulary of the times).  But "Will and Grace" brought gays into households for nearly a decade.  Who now would or could say they had never known a gay or lesbian?  Despite all the state votes against gay marriage, the long arc seems to be moving in the right direction.  And then, of course, yesterday President Obama said outloud what he must've believed silently (given his actions on Don't Ask, Don't Tell and his directive to the attorney general not to defend DOMA) for a long time.  Which of us could have imagined twenty years ago, a President endorsing gay marriage? 

Suddenly, a year ago, the cancer diagnosis seemed to change my whole sense of identity.  It risked becoming my identity, making everything else of very tenuous importance.  My whole life changed, both physically and psychologically.  There was the operation and the brace.  There was radiation.  There are and always will be ten or more pills and a shot every morning and two or three more pills in the evening.  There were practical tasks: arranging doctor visits, re-arranging furniture, re-writing my will.  There was a new realization of the loss of possibilities and of dignity (though that was low on the list).  And behind it all was the prognosis--10 or 11 months for stage four kidney cancer--and knowing that the cancer had metastasized at least six months before the correct diagnosis.  (As I've said, I can't not count the months.)  But I've lived with the cancer diagnosis for over a year now, and somehow it's taken its place as just one more facet of who I am.  It doesn't define me as it did for a while.  I've settled into a routine--not the most exciting or adventurous rhythm, not without an almost constant reminder of discomfort and side effects and limits, but not really unpleasant.  One/you/I can't think about mortality all the time--not when there is so much interesting/heartening/discouraging/funny in the world.  Give me a stack of essays to grade; I'll pitch in.  And I'm sure I'll find occasions to write LOL or LMAO in the margin and, if I'm lucky an occasion to say, "Wow!  I don't think I wrote that well when I was an undergrad."