The weekend air is
medicine.
I feel like I've
been granted access the mecca of unexpected intimacy.
Cancer removes
whatever weird barriers we sometimes have with others. A mastectomy of bullshit, my mother
suggests.
When it comes to
illness, dying, death -- those darknesses -- it seems we are still so very much
Plymouth Pilgrims -- all fear and fretting and fortifications, and a strong
sense of our own alienness in a hostile land.
We don't begin to know what to do with ourselves. We cross our arms over our chests and try to
look on the bright side as we starve.
Try to see without
understanding.
Waldeinsamkeit is
the untranslatable German word for the feeling of divine solitude and
contemplation in the woods.
Dying provokes
nearsightedness in the caregiver.
One big upside of
being told I have incurable cancer is that after all these years, my husband
has finally stopped smugly saying, "It's your funeral", when I make a
decision he doesn’t agree with.
Buying a sofa
online, like many of life's biggest decisions, takes research and trust, but
mostly trust.
