The Healing Powers of the Fuck-It Bucket

And other unconventional gifts for friends with cancer.

Photo by Amy Sedaris, I Like You

In my early thirties, when a person is still too young to get calls like this, one of my oldest and dearest childhood friends called from across the country to tell me she had cancer.

Advanced cervical cancer. As a busy mom of three young kids, with a husband gone for long stretches for work, she had missed the early signs and was now facing the unfaceable. Despite the distance, I kicked into high gear to send love and support in any way I could.

My friend began the grueling process of chemo, etc, etc. and spent long hours in bed. I thought, what would be helpful in the moments when she wanted to distract her mind? She was a deeply spiritual person and found solace in worship music and Bible verses but sometimes the “Praying Through Cancer” books got tiresome, so I sent her some of my favorites, “Bridget Jones’ Diary,” “Nanny Diaries” and “The Devil Wears Prada.” The first I found laugh-out-loud funny and well, laughter is the best medicine.

Years later, I received another call. From another friend who had just experienced a seizure and learned it was from astrocytoma in her brain. The mother of two young children, she was anticipating major brain surgery and a long recovery. During one of the early visits to see her at Cedars Sinai in Los Angeles, I noticed under the television a small plaque that read, “Comedy Central, Channel xxx.”

Hmmm. Noteworthy that the hospital would highlight one channel on the neurosurgery wing and that channel was a comedy.

When I next visited her in the hospital, I told her I would bring a chapter from my favorite book for a bedside reading. And she was game. Still woozy and recovering, she smiled as I embarked on, “Jesus Shaves” from David Sedaris’ (my favorite author. See Stalking David Sedaris) book “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” I did not anticipate that a number of our friends would be settled into the room and there was quite an audience present chuckling along as I read.

I am someone who uses humor as a defense mechanism, to divert from hard things. I’m quite good at it. But over the years I have also developed the ability to sit in challenging places and put humor aside. For my first friend, I helped her to the restroom when a nurse in the hospital wasn’t available. For my second friend, I held a tissue to the side of her nose when her right side was temporarily paralyzed from the tumor and she couldn’t blow her nose sufficiently.

I didn’t use humor to completely escape the realities of what was happening to my friends, but I wasn’t afraid to access it in some of the darker moments.

Enter my purple wig.

A third friend spent a year treating breast cancer, from which she fully recovered. But it was a brutal year. Unlike my other friends, she lived nearby and I was able to pop in to bring flowers or just say hi. One morning, I came by for a visit after she had lost the final bits of hair and was sporting knit caps. I thought this a perfect opportunity to show support and knocked on her door wearing my cute purple wig cut in a short bob. It was itchy and got uncomfortable quickly and some of that was just the point.

She too was uncomfortable and the wig made her smile. For my friends who were spending day-in and day-out in the throes of illness and treatment, sometimes you just need a purple wig and a funny book or a special bucket.

Here we come to the Fuck-It Bucket.

In the book I mentioned above, “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” David Sedaris writes about his brother who has a panacea for hard times: The Fuck-It Bucket. It’s quite simple actually, “a plastic pail filled with jawbreakers and bite-size candy bars. When shit brings you down, just say ‘fuck it,’ and eat yourself some motherfucking candy” (from “You Can’t Kill The Rooster”).

It is a unique person who decides to give this bucket to a sick or hurting friend (if I do say so myself). It is an equally unique person who receives this bucket.

And generally, the two are bonded for life.

This was the case for our office administrator at the elementary school where my boys attended and where I served on the PTA board for a number of years. Close to the beginning of one school year, this friend learned she had advanced cancer with little time left. She was a remarkable presence in the front office, offering care and wisdom to many who came in and we were all distraught. With her ribald sense of humor and quick wit, she was a perfect recipient of the bucket, which I gave to her while school was in session. (Although I labeled it in code because of, well, the kids.)

There is a certain risk that the bucket or a wig can be dismissive of the real pain in these stories. And as I admitted above, I can definitely use humor to deflect from hard things. But there were also foot rubs in the hospital and tears together in bed and messy cleanups. I recently extended the Fuck-It Bucket sentiment to a friend caring for a dying mother in a toxic environment. I wasn’t able to deliver a bucket to her but I walked her through the process of making one.

I also listened and said over and over, “Shit, this is really hard.”

So, the bucket shouldn’t come by itself. There is a lot of earnest paying attention to your people, listening to them, and creating space for their pain and process. But a bucket or book or wig can serve as a different kind of connection, a life-line that says, I see you are still alive and to be alive is to laugh sometimes.

And if you have that person in your life who you think a worthy recipient of the Fuck-It Bucket, I highly recommend it. And if you also wear a purple wig when you deliver it, well, all the better.