« Previous article Next article»
September all told, 2009
Published on Sep 29, 2009
I am exhausted. I admit it. My body is tired of three weeks of tests, waiting, worrying, planning, and simply being thrown into the fire.
I’m ready for it to be done. Except that I can’t stop it.
I’m ready to stop thinking about me. I’m ready to stop aching all over. I’m ready to stop talking about cancer. I’m ready to stop worrying about my business. I’m ready to stop dealing with well meaning friends and family. I’m ready to end my connection to the Norris Cotton Cancer Center.
But I can’t.
To quote a lovely children’s book, a favorite of ours, “We’re Going On A Bear Hunt,” by Helen Oxenbury: “ We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. We have to go through it.”
************************************************
There is nothing like cancer to remind you that you are, after all, on this life journey alone. We fill our lives with work and activity and family and friends and in the flurry of it all, we can keep from feeling the solitude. But when adversity calls, the silence is deafening, at moments excruciating.
And yet somehow, I think I am thankful to know this, to feel this. It is profound and somehow strengthens me. There is something here that I would have learned no other way. And there aren’t yet words to describe it.