Paradoxical: Stories about thoughts we shouldn't have

We all have thoughts that can be seemingly absurd or self-contradictory. In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers reckon with their conflicting thoughts.

Part 1: After surviving breast cancer, comedian Ophira Eisenberg hates the pink breast cancer awareness ribbon.

Ophira Eisenberg is a standup comic and host of NPR’s nationally syndicated comedy, trivia show Ask Me Another where she interviews and plays silly games with Sir Patrick Stewart, Taye Diggs, Awkwafina, Roxane Gay, Terry Crews, Jessica Walter, Josh Groban, Nick Kroll, Tony Hawk, George Takei, Sasha Velour, Ethan Hawke, Julia Stiles, Lewis Black, Uzo Aduba, Michael C. Hall and more. She also is a regular host and teller with The Moth and her stories have been featured on The Moth Radio Hour and in their best-selling books, including the most recent: Occasional Magic: True Stories About Defying the Impossible. Ophira’s own comedic memoir, Screw Everyone: Sleeping My Way to Monogamy was optioned for a feature film. She has appeared on Comedy Central, This Week At The Comedy Cellar, The New Yorker Festival, Kevin Hart’s LOL Network, HBO’s Girls, Gotham Live, The Late Late Show, The Today Show, and VH-1. Her comedy special Inside Joke is available on Amazon and iTunes.

Part 2: After the sudden death of his mom, Richard Kemeny feels numb to the world and his feelings.

Richard Kemeny is a freelance science and travel writer based in London. His work has appeared in New Scientist, The Atlantic, Science, Hakai, the BBC and National Geographic. He used to produce The Economist's science and tech podcast, Babbage, and has reported from several countries for PRI's The World. He has received fellowships to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Marine Biological Laboratory, and used to work for a coral reef restoration foundation on the northern coast of Colombia. In his spare time he goes bouldering or thinks about cold water swimming. He is @rakemeny

Episode Transcript

Part 1

For me, the hardest part of going through surgery and radiation for breast cancer was talking to other people about it. That's not true. It was having it, but also talking to other people. And having it, I say, it was the feeling of being in a holding pattern for two years. Part of that was because when they found some, we had surgery to remove it. But then they went back and found more. I just felt like they would always be finding it. If they looked, they would keep finding it and it would go on and on and on, and I would never, ever again be able to take a step forward.

We live in this world where there's a lot of people throwing around things like, “Live in the present,” “Embrace the moment,” but have you ever been forced to live in the present? It is horrible. It is fucking jail. No, do not live in the present. Think about tomorrow. Plan for the future. That is freedom, okay?

I really did not like telling people about it and I told very few people of what I was going through because I didn't want to hear their responses, especially with something like cancer, something that is so scary to people and complicated and nebulous.

What you end up hearing a lot is their made up ideas, not based on scientific fact or even expertise or experience, just thoughts that they have had about how cancer happens and how it is cured. And you get to hear about them when you're in your most vulnerable moment.

Ophira Eisenberg shares her story at Caveat in New York, NY in July 2023. Photo by Zhen Qin.

A lot of like I hear positivity and hope and that's what it's all about. You're like, “Thank you. It never occurred to me.”

“They say many cancers come from stress. Were you stressed out?”

I'm like, “Oh, so it was that year that I was worried about paying rent? That was the year that I got breast cancer? It's my fault? Good. Thank you. Thank you. Really appreciate it.”

Because the answer of, “It's random,” or, “We don't really understand, like cells do weird shit that medicine hasn't really caught up to figuring out why,” it's not very comforting. Nobody wants to hear that. I didn't want to hear it but some of us have to live with it.

I spent so many days as Sloan Kettering. And, let me tell you, I was searching for comfort and relief and that is not the place. It is the décor, I will just say. The décor, there is no décor. And I know that's purposeful. The whole place is decorated in muted beige and gray. There are some paintings on the wall. There are all these generic landscapes and flowers created by AI, almost. And every floor is the exact same. So if you end up on the wrong floor, you have no idea because there's no reason why you would know.

I know why that is. Well, I assume it's because they don't want you to attach on to an object or even a color while you're going through pain and trauma. I mean, it's amazing what you attach onto.

I do remember my surgeon's earrings, because they were the Chanel ‘C’. And I was like, “How much money are you fucking making?” So mad as I was going under.

The only thing that stuck out in any of those muted beige rooms was the pink ribbon. The pink ribbon of breast cancer.

Okay, listen. I know that pink ribbon campaign and all of it brings a lot of people a lot of stuff. It brings hope. It brings levity. It brings awareness. It brings community. I just didn't relate to it. I didn't like it because, to me, it felt too, I don't know, bright. Like, I just wasn't in a mindset of throwing on a boa and cheers in with a Cosmo and going on a bike ride. I didn't relate to it.

To me, it was like sprinkling glitter on a pile of shit. I felt a little silenced by the pink ribbon and I didn't even have the worst case of breast cancer. I didn't want to hang out with the pink ribbon people. I wanted to hang out with the women with breast cancer that were like drinking rye in basements, listening to Joni Mitchell albums over and over again. But they don't have that group.

I just, I ended up feeling very repelled by it. Every time I saw it, I was a little bit angry at that pink ribbon because it also made me feel like I should be better, a better survivor. It made me feel like I should bounce back faster and I should be bouncing back in a bubbly and fun way.

The two years were basically up. I was done, surgery, radiation, and I was told, “Here's your statistical chance of having a recurrence and we'll see you in a year.”

Anyone who's been through any kind of medical thing, I think you probably too wish that there was some sort of decompression chamber. Like when scuba divers come up too quickly, to avoid the bends, they go in a decompression chamber before they're just thrown out into reality. I wanted that. I wanted to go through some sort of chamber because I wasn't ready. I had no idea how to take a step forward.

What I ended up doing was I accepted a last minute gig in Los Angeles to do stand up comedy. And I did it because it felt like the old me. I wanted to go back to the past. I thought, “Oh, this would be great. I'll go to LA. I'll do some stand up gig. I'll drink like a shitty Chardonnay on the plane. And then I'll do my show and then pass out in a king bed. It will be like old times.”

I was just so looking forward to being in a hotel room and looking at myself in the mirror and seeing nothing that reminded me of anything of the last two years.

So I was at JFK waiting to get on my flight. My flight was definitely filled with people that were mostly residents of LA, because you can just spot them. They were all dressed in LA colors, like pastel yellows and blues and peddling around in bedazzled flipflops while I was in like the New York uniform. Just black, black, black, black.

I go to give my boarding pass and I notice that the people checking us in, the agents are wearing pink outfits. I'm thinking, “I thought Delta's colors were like blue or red.” But, whatever. I haven't traveled in a long time. Maybe I forgot.

And as I'm boarding the plane, I'm looking at their pink outfits and I'm like, “Holy shit.” Because I have not registered that it is October, which is breast cancer month. And Delta is fully committed to the pink ribbon campaign.

I sit down in my seat and I am accosted by a flight attendant who shoves a drink, pink cocktail menu into my hands and just tells me that part of the proceeds from my cocktail will go towards breast cancer awareness. I was like, “I am aware of breast cancer!”

I just shove it violently in my seat pocket and I pull my black sweater over my face. I'm just steaming and I'm just thinking, “Will I ever have a chance to take a breath, just to take a moment to heal?”

I get off the plane and I'm like, “You know what? I'm just gonna get in the cab and go to my hotel. I'll have my dumb, shitty chardonnay at the hotel and it will feel great.”

I get in the cab. He's got the radio on and I immediately start hearing that some Chevrolet lot is having a breast cancer… and I'm like, “Turn off that radio.”

We start driving towards my hotel and I'm thinking, “It's fine. Yeah, it's old me. It's old me. I'm in a cab. I'm in LA. I'm going towards the hotel.”

I'm looking out at LA scene and it's just so bright. The sun is just bleaching everything that I'm seeing. We're coming towards my hotel and I see it in the distance. I'm looking at it and I see that there's a church beside my hotel.

And as we're getting closer, the sun is in my eyes, but I see that on this church there is a huge ribbon. There is a huge ribbon on the steeple of this church that is right beside my hotel, like a 40 foot tall ribbon.

I'm like, “I'm probably gonna get the hotel room whose window looks right on that fucking ribbon this entire time.”

I'm like, “Oh, my God. I'm never gonna get beyond this, because it's gonna follow me everywhere. I'm never going to be able to escape or move forward. And I can't do anything about where I am at and I can't fix myself and I can't fix the scar, and they'll always gonna find more cancer.”

As we get a little closer, I start to see this ribbon clearly and more clear, and then I see that it is red. I just go, “AIDS! Yes, AIDS. Fucking thank you, AIDS.”

I actually hear myself and I physically clasp my own mouth in shame. I look at the taxi driver if he is registering an expression. He's not. And I'm thinking, “I don't even know who this person is, what they've been through, who they've lost, what their experience is. Whoa, I have lost grip of a lot.”

We pull up and I say, “Hey, sorry.”

And he just goes, “$42.95,” or whatever the price was. I remember that amazing weird relationship that we have with cab drivers where it's just like nothing ever happened.

I get out of the cab and I'm just standing in front of that church next to my hotel looking at this ribbon. And I will admit to you, I was giggling. I was giggling at me being a colossal idiot, at the absurdity, at how stupid everything is, how much suffering there is everywhere and I thought, “You know what? I got to redeem myself. I got to redeem myself. There's a church right here. You know what? Tomorrow, I'm gonna go into that church and I'm gonna pray.”

I don't know how to pray. I've never prayed before, but I'm going to learn how to pray.

“And I'm gonna pray for everyone who’s suffered and everyone who's going through some medical thing and everyone who feels a lot of trauma about anything with their health and I'm gonna pray for them,” I said. I thought, “I'm gonna do that tomorrow.”

I went into my hotel thinking that is the first time I've thought about tomorrow.

Thank you.

Part 2

It's 2019 and I'm on a boat. I'm in America in Massachusetts, whale country. I'm doing some whale watching, watching them kind of jumping, rolling around on the ocean, taking some photos and videos, basically just doing whaley stuff.

I get a text. I look down and it's my mum. She's asking what I'm up to. And so I send her a video of what I'm doing and we talk about it for a bit.

Just to backtrack, I'm in America on a fellowship. Basically, the idea is that journalists like me are going to spend time with scientists and hang out with them for a week and do science and figure out that they're actually just real people and not just names on a page.

Our week was all about algae. So we go out into this bay, Waquoit Bay, which is filled with nitrogen because of all the people living there and the algae is going crazy. So we go out on these rowing boats and we scoop up all the algae and all the little critters that are swimming with them and then we take it back to the lab every day. We dry it out and weigh it and count it out and count the species. It's very methodical, kind of therapeutic in a mildly suicidally boring kind of way.

And this whale watching was the penultimate day, so we had a day off. So that was nice. Then I go back that evening and go to sleep. Then I wake up in the morning to a text from my dad. It just says, “Call me when you get this.” That’s never good.

I realized just looking down at the message that my mum had died.

Richard Kemeny performs his story at Aces and Eights Saloon Bar in London, UK in May 2023. Photo by Richard Mukuze.

Basically, me and my mum had had like a kind of rocky time throughout some parts of my life, mostly because I wanted to go on adventures and she wanted me to stay at home in the nest. But a few years before this fellowship, I'd gone to Brazil, moved abroad. Even though I knew she wouldn't like it, funny enough, the distance actually kind of brought us closer. We would Skype a lot.

But at the same time, she'd been getting progressively more ill. She had cancer when I was 15 and she'd had a lot of treatment. Obviously, that gave her many more years of life. But, by the end, there were a lot of complications with the treatments and she started kind of losing her voice a bit. Towards the end, we would do Skypes and I would just kind of talk at her about what I was doing. Luckily for both of us, we both enjoyed the sound of my own voice.

I think at that point when I was out there in America and watching the whales, I think she was happy for me to be having adventures and living my life, perhaps because she knew that hers was coming to an end.

That morning, I called my dad and he tells me to be strong. Honestly, I kind of felt like laughing at the cliché but I wasn't really in the mood. I was in a country that I didn't really know, surrounded by people I didn't know on this course. Not only that but it was the final day, so we had to do our presentations about what we learnt that week. Honestly, it was quite good to have that distraction.

So I went out and did probably the best algae presentation anyone's ever done in a room full of scientists. I was just throwing out facts and statistics left, right and center and just kind of burying all the feelings.

I made it through to midday, which I was very pleased with. But then the entire fellowship was over so then I was just staring down the barrel of an entire afternoon off with nothing to do apart from thinking about my dead mum.

So I did what I think any self respecting Brit of drinking age would do. I went down to the local bar and got shitfaced all afternoon.

Wanderson the fish. Photo courtesy of Richard Kemeny.

But drinking alone in America, thankfully, is socially acceptable and possibly even encouraged. So that’s what I did.

I did that but then drinking alone is one thing and flying home to a funeral alone is very different. It doesn't really matter if you're in town or whatever of JFK airport, one of the busiest airports in the world. You're surrounded by people, you still feel very alone. Even if you're grieving, none of them really care. The more people are around me, the lonelier I felt.

So I go home for the funeral and then fly back to Brazil. Then 2020 rolls around, everyone's favorite year, and COVID is there and it's just getting pretty bad, particularly in Brazil. A lot of people are dying around the world. I, obviously, like everyone else, realize that this is terrible, but I kind of go through this weird experience which I thought was unique, but maybe people who've lost someone close maybe will understand.

I kind of realize that it was terrible all these people were dying, but I mean I can’t actually feel empathy. At that point, I couldn't connect to this global collective trauma. I couldn't feel what everyone else was feeling. I just felt kind of numb.

Another feeling that I had, which I'm not particularly proud of, was that I knew that all these people dying was terrible but part of me actually felt glad that other people were experiencing some of the pain that I'd had to go through alone the year before and experiencing some of the loneliness of loss.

In Brazil that time, obviously, it's locked down and everything's closed, apart from this pet shop near our house. So each week, me and my girlfriend go and we look at the rabbits jumping around and listen to all the nice tropical birds.

One thing led to another and, eventually, we bring home a fish. It's an amazing fish. It's a dragon beta and it's got like these silvery white scales and this flowing, red, plummy tail out back. This guy's got a lot of character, a lot of sass. It's a great fish.

We named him Wanderson, after the Health Secretary of Brazil at that time. I get on well with fish. Through my life, I've had some good times, mostly granted on like when I get back from the pub and talk to them, but they always seem to be very receptive. They come to the front of the tank and talk back. They're good listeners and they give good advice.

But Wanderson was like fish plus. Turns out, he likes music as well. I would play tunes and he would kind of come to the front of the tank and just swim around a bit and do some jiving. That was nice to find out that he liked that.

The pandemic goes on and then Bill Withers dies. Great musical giant. The world grieves for him. I think this is a great opportunity to introduce Wanderson to his entire back catalogue. So we sit there one afternoon in the sun, drinking the Granny’s, and listening to old Bill Withers. I'm there with my fish, now my firm friend and confidant. It was a lovely day, I would say.

But then after a few weeks, Wanderson starts to kind of act weird. He starts drooping down on one side and swimming in a slightly strange way. It's not like typical fish behavior. Basically, we hadn't done too much research before we got him. We didn't really get him the best tank. I mean, it had like a nice little plastic frog and some plastic plants and maybe even a castle but no real filtration of any kind, because it was just a glass bowl.

So he starts to get sick, we think. We decided to take him to the vet. One day, we jump in the car, me and my girlfriend at the front, Wanderson in the back, air really silent, and we drive to the vet. We're sitting there in the waiting room looking at him, feeling kind of sad.

Then we go through into the operating theatre. I'm looking around at all the pictures on the wall of animals that people normally take to the vet, like cats or dogs, but we're there with our fish. We put him on the table and start kind of discussing his health.

Obviously, I'm looking at him and I'm feeling guilty that he got ill so quickly. I'm feeling kind of sad, but the idea of three fully grown humans standing around and talking about the health of a tiny fish is a really hilarious moment. I'm sure Wanderson appreciated the attention too, cheeky little scamp.

We take him home. We go to the pet shop again. We get him the best fish medication on the market and this amazing tank. It's like a palace. Still the same friendly frog, real plants this time, which is nice, and amazing filtration. It's basically like a marine protected area all for one fish.

We think, “Yeah, he's gonna get better.” We wait for weeks and watch him, just hoping. But he doesn't. I think maybe we left it too late. So, one day, I make the difficult executive decision to kill my friend. Still talking about the fish.

And killing someone you like is not something to be taken lightly. So, I do my research, watch some YouTube videos and try and find out the most humane way to kill a fish. I feel kind of bad, actually, because the volume was on when I was watching these videos so Wanderson absolutely could watch too. For a second, I had this little beady eye looking at me.

Well, I find this nice Australian lady who seems to be an expert at dispatching fish. And I watch as she kills her finned friend and then I learn from her, basically. Turns out, the best way to kill a fish is clove oil. Clove is obviously delicious to smell and great with cooked meats, but it's toxic to fish. You put a few drops of clove oil in the tank and they kind of go to sleep, then you put in a few more and then they just fade away to fish heaven. So I decided that that's the way I'm going to do it.

Murder is a terrible thing, obviously, but I think why not make an event of it. So I put on Bill Withers, because I think he likes that. Yeah, we're sitting there, listening. It's just like the good old times, just a bit more murdery. Then I scoop him out of his tank and put him in this little Tupperware box that he loves so much.

I'm looking down at him, seeing him swimming around, I'm like, “Maybe it's not the right time. Maybe I should just wait a bit longer. Maybe he'll get better.” But I realize I'm just kind of talking myself out of it.

So, there we are. Bill Withers is still playing. I'll tell you now the irony of his song Lean on Me playing while I'm about to assassinate my friend is really not lost on me. I'm pretty sure Wanderson actually likes the joke too. I'm sure he can find any of this funny.

So I reach for the clove oil and I put in a few drops. I watch him kind of slow down swimming and then just lie on his side. Then I put in a few more, maybe too many. Eventually, he just kind of fades away. I love him but I didn't check his pulse or anything, but after a while he was definitely dead.

It was sad. I mean, I was just hit with the same kind of cold grief that I felt before. Maybe people who've lost a pet know that it can be exactly the same as losing a human friend. It's just another moment marked in my life that I know that I'm never going to speak to this person again. It's a fish, yeah.

And not only that. Not only am I sad about it but then I realize that, this time, I have to dispose of the body. So I take Wanderson out, put him into this little polystyrene takeaway pot, and then put him into the freezer and find him a nice spot on the top shelf next to all the other frozen fish.

Then the afternoon goes on and I drink a bit more, a few more of the Granny’s. As I'm sat there, I realized that something's kind of changed for me. Basically, experiencing this real personal grief again has kind of reconnected me to the pain that everyone else around the world was feeling at that time. And maybe that was Wanderson’s role for me in my life. He was there to bring me back into the fold.

Obviously, it's not the greatest of shared experiences, but it really feels good to be back. So thank you, Wanderson. I'm sorry we didn't just get you a better tank.

Thanks a lot.