For me, at least, cancer was partly love. With each appointment, each fragment of a second, a cancer patient is always almost dead, or so it feels, and in such circumstances you can’t help but love. You love your cat, your mom and dad, your kids, steaming noodles in broth, your breath, your future — everything that might be lost or never come to be. Closeness with death carries with it a corresponding new closeness with life. Food has more flavor, green is greener. You love the way your husband brings you coffee in the morning. You love the miracle of your own enduring capacity for love. You love your friends you’ve made in your chemo rooms — a woman named Elizabeth, my pal. She wrote letters to me and bought my daughter a newborn outfit. I wonder if that was weird for her, buying my baby an outfit knowing that I was knee deep in chemo. She felt love too. That love was put into real live action when we would run into each other at the farmers market with our families.
Her husband had my type of cancer, but he was a about 40 years older than me. I wonder if that was weird for her too. I was younger than her own children. She had grandkids in high school. My daughter was just born and I had a two year old – I’m certain she also gave her a gift too. She felt love.
At some point her husband’s heart stopped beating. Just stopped one afternoon while eating lunch she made for the two of them.
Elizabeth and I went our separate ways – I’m a little ashamed it had to be that way. I didn’t know what else to do. So I quietly drifted away from her and back into my life of chemo and babies, and surviving cancer.
I loved the woman – she cared so much, had so much love. But I’m alive. Her husband’s dead. A likely story, I guess.
Truth or Dare 