Coming into Focus

Recuperation is not a bad thing on a front porch in July. I am reveling in my stretched out days filled with quiet reading, chats with friends, rounds of Five Crowns against Emma where I beat the pants off her. My incision--so painful at first--pulls at me less every day, even when I try to hold back a sneeze or a laugh at the funny little clawfoot shower routine that soaks Emma as much as me. I love my shuffle-walks down to Kollen Park. I love my daily texts from pals. I love my house with its easily navigable kitchen, its front screens and soft breezes, its surprisingly manageable stairs that lead to my cloud of a bed. Mostly I love the unexpected gift of time.

A couple weeks ago, when I received the call from my gynecologist less than an hour after my ultrasound, I was scared. Her voice seemed almost too calm when she described the rare growth in my abdomen and what my next few days would look like: CT scans; chest x-ray; EKG; bloodwork for “tumor markers” and—scariest of all—an appointment with an oncologist. Despite her reassurances that the oncologist was precautionary, my 3 a.m. ghosts had me dead before Emma’s high school graduation. I mapped it out: If the cancer was too far gone, I’d accept no treatments and live out my last days with energy, pain-free. I’d cash in my modest retirement fund; travel with Emma to Italy; host intimate, candlelit dinners or huge festive feasts at home; play tennis and win; write my memoir with wry humor and spicy exaggerations; never leave the house without my camera; buy a computer that wouldn’t crash with the load of too many pixels; join an art gallery willing to display my photos that, posthumously, would carry deep symbolism and bittersweet poignancy. I’d make videotapes (are they still called that?) for Emma, advising her about college and friendships and future love relationships and how to parent her kids who I’d never be able to hold and nuzzle. I’d write letters to everyone important to me, apologizing for any wrong I'd never righted, wishing I’d stayed more in touch, adding sage advice only a dying person could impart (live as if you were dying!). Everyone would shake their heads at my courage to face death--and life--with great aplomb.

As the days progressed and the blood work looked hopeful, the surgeon guessed before surgery that the tumor was benign. I breathed more easily and suffered less melodrama. And yet it wasn’t until I was wheeled post-surgery into my hospital room and saw my brother’s huge smile that I really let go of that fear. It hurt too much to cry, but I just wanted to weep. I was still in the oncology unit and (possibly) everyone around me had been delivered different, more dire news. I had dodged a volleyball-sized bullet and I was lucky. Crazy lucky. And beyond grateful for that.

I'm at an age where I--and many people I care about--have lost loved ones: parents, a brother, a sister, a nephew. Some have fought serious illness, or have nursed others through one, or have suffered depression or divorce, or supported someone who has. Enduring these painful experiences etches our faces with wrinkles and our eyes with sadness, but also fine-tunes our emotions to a sharper--even raw--sense of gratitude: for the simple beauty we experience in our everyday relationships with family, with friends, with nature, with home, with a higher being, with life. Pretense is stripped away and the true essence of life comes into greater focus.

It’s an interesting place to be now. All those doomsday promises still lurk in my head and life's bare bones lay more bare than ever-- all juxtaposed to the all-too-reality of having to make ends meet and needing reserves for--gratefully--the future. I have to balance it all out yet; decide what I’ve shelved that maybe I could dust off or newly explore, knowing that, really, I still have numbered days. One of my first instincts is to write again. Not that memoir yet—although clearly that would sparkle with high intrigue--but just little observations.

All starting with this crazy luck of mine. So much is part of it. Amazing family. Amazing friends. Amazing doctors, nurses, meds. Amazing support. People who were present for me before Wilson, during Wilson, after Wilson. I have pictures of him, by the way. He's quite something. But as scary a visitor as he was, I'm grateful for him, too--which is easy to say, of course, now that he's gone.