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Ultimately, I believe in the evolution of the soul—that the meaning and purpose of life is to enrich the soul with all the joys and heartaches that this life and other lives can impart, that once the soul has learned as much as it can, with all its wisdom and knowledge it enters what the Buddhists would call Nirvana and what Christians might call Heaven and a closeness and even oneness with God.
Believe what you need to believe in order to find comfort and peace with the inevitable fate that is common to every living thing on this planet. Death awaits us all; one can choose to run in fear from it or one can face it head-on with thoughtfulness, and from that thoughtfulness peace and serenity.
A friend who died within two years of her diagnosis told me she sometimes felt like her husband and she were two ghosts living in the same house, pale shadows of their former happy selves, circling each other, not knowing what to say, disconnected from each other and the rest of the world, so lonely and isolated in their individual suffering.
Who will and can replace me? Who can nurture her musically and otherwise as I can? The answer is no one. No one can possibly love my children as much as I do, not even their father. So the best thing I can do is to line up as many people as I can to be there for them in the different aspects of their lives. That’s what I want to talk to you about.
But Allende reminds me that there is value in our individual memories, our own past, our own history; after all, what are we but the products of all our experiences? Rather than looking without to find inspiration, strength, and hope, sometimes we must look within ourselves to discover and discern our own stories. There are, after all, miracles in there.
have felt God’s presence more than once in my life, and I have felt his absence. And in those times when God was otherwise occupied, I found, through my shame, frustration, heartache, self-pity, and self-loathing, a strength and resolve that I didn’t know I had.
That night in the hospital room, I willed myself to again acknowledge the fear, told myself to do everything within my power to control my destiny and let everything else go, and then ordered myself to look ahead and walk through the fear once more.
I craved newness—new places, new people, new challenges. Strangeness was frightening, but mostly it was exciting.
Now I lie on my daughters’ beds and wonder what thoughts, fears, and dreams will course through their minds and hearts as they lie in that exact same position.
And yet, I’m pretty sure that Mia was conceived that night—as they say, out of the ashes of defeat…
I tell myself that I am not afraid of dying, that I am so tired and in so much pain, I want to die at this point. Most of the time this is true, but I am not fully there yet. I haven’t found the peace I so desperately want, the kind of peace in which I would be okay with a bad scan, knowing that death is coming that much sooner. Peace is all I really want. The question is, How do I find it?
They say that youth is wasted on the young. Now, as I approach my final days, I realize that health is wasted on the healthy, and life is wasted on the living.
It is my absolute goal to die well, to die at peace, without regret for the life I have lived, proud and satisfied.
I want my children to learn by the example of my death not to be afraid of death, to understand it as simply a part of life. I want them to see how loved their mother was and that, by extension, they are safe and loved. I know a death that is at once lively and peaceful and filled with love will be one of the greatest gifts I can give them. For
The intense excitement and anxiety of falling in love are only memories now, impersonal almost, as if it all happened to somebody else.
There was no romantic love between my grandparents, at least not the kind of love I would have wanted. Theirs was a love born of familiarity, habit, obligation.
I learned that no one could tell me what I could or couldn’t do, that only I could set my limitations.
Being with you and falling in love with you was the easiest thing I’ve ever done. It felt so right. You were so smart—my intellectual equal, if not my intellectual superior. You taught me. You challenged me (admittedly sometimes in the most annoying ways).
That is exactly what you have always done, loved me and accepted me for who I am with all my imperfections.
My now six- and eight-year-old daughters love having me tell them the stories of how I and they were born. They never tire of hearing the same thing again and again.
And yet, it is the very creation of life, that undefinable spark that begins the process, that is the miracle. And then from there, a million and one things have to go just right, and fortunately for me and as far as we can tell—knock on wood—they did with respect to my little girls. The proper occurrence of those million and one things in the right time sequence is a miracle.
Who else could tell my daughters how I counted their fingers and toes to make sure they were all there?
I’ve always felt, even long before I found out about the herbalist, that I have been living on borrowed time, that my life had been saved once already—twice if you count the restoration of residual vision as constructive salvation—that no one gets to have her life saved a third time.
We live in a culture that fears the unwinding of the miracle. It is dark; it is frightening; it is tragic, especially when the death is deemed premature.
And so I started writing in search of my truth, to gain that understanding and wisdom of what it means to live and die, of what it is to live fully and unwind our individual miracles consciously.
And for any who might be reading this: I am grateful to have had you here, on this journey. I would presume to encourage you to relish your time, to not be disabled by trials or numbed by routine, to say yes as much as you can, and to mock the probabilities. Luxuriate in your sons and daughters, husbands and wives. And live, friends. Just live. Travel. Get some stamps in those passports.
In Antarctica, I felt as if we had departed our home planet and were closer to some serious answers about what it all means. One cannot help but think big thoughts in such a place. One cannot help but imagine God—and
Feeling small and insignificant is a rarity in the course of our daily lives. Sure enough, once I returned from Antarctica, I again became consumed by the minutiae of my life, minutiae that often felt important and momentous—navigating
We live every day not in the shadow of greatness and grandeur but within the confines of our small but seemingly enormous lives.
And then things happen that jerk us out of our complacency and make us feel small and powerless again. But I have learned that in that powerlessness comes truth, and in truth comes a life lived consciously.
And my father said, essentially, You think you have that kind of power, do you? The truth is, there was nothing you could have done.
It is in the acceptance of truth that real wisdom and peace come. It is in the acceptance of truth that real living begins. Conversely, avoidance of truth is the denial of life.
To the degree that my book speaks truth about not just the cancer experience but the human experience in general, I want people to be able to find themselves in the writing. And in so doing, I want them to realize that they have never been and will never be alone in their suffering….I want them to find within the rich, twisted, and convoluted details of my life truth and wisdom that will bolster and comfort them through their joys and sorrow, laughter and tears.
