A Gift

Saying goodbye is hard. There is a certain sense each time you say it that it may be your last chance to. My niece June hates to say goodbye. When it's time for anyone to leave she just ignores every attempt to get her to say goodbye. It's as if she senses that by not saying goodbye the moment, her reality hasn't ended. I understand that better now than I ever have.

Heather and I are getting ready for the fight of her life. We are looking her surgery in the eye and have to confront all the issues that go with it. There are the logistical issues of time off work and post-operative care, wills and power-of-attorney forms, bills and insurance paperwork. Then there are the far more challenging issues: are you going to be an organ donor, or donate your body to science; if you have a stroke and they say you're "brain dead" do you want to be left on a ventilator; what songs do you want played at your wake?

It is some heavy lifting emotionally. I will say this though, Cancer is a gift. Those words, that sentiment, is not some original thought of mine, or even my turn of a phrase, but it remains true none the less. Since the day Heather and I met I have felt that her experience with cancer formed for her an understanding of what matters in this world; an understanding we share because of my personal quest to look death in the eye everyday and let the specter of death know it does not worry me.

Cancer is a gift that liberates the patient and the caregiver to recklessly abandon worrying about the petty and petulant. You give yourself permission to say, "Fuck it" to all of the little silly bullshit trials and tribulations of daily life that we frail humans become so easily wrapped up in. Not to say that we don't get annoyed with one another because of the same mundane things that everyone else does, we do. I think when you live every day with the understanding that you don't know how many days you have left, how many birthdays or Christmases, or Mondays, if you really embrace the beauty of it you see that it is a wonderfully crisp sense of life. The meaning of life is the experience of being alive, and the gift of staring at death is that it reminds you to embrace being alive.