A couple of friends took me to lunch the other day and said that I had sounded so down in my last posts that they were worried about me.
I felt a bit bad, because I hadn't meant to sound down, and then I wondered if I have been, and why.
Well, I guess there is the usual. It has been a long, brutal winter for everyone, and I have had lots of colds, and so has my family. Work has been uninspiring. I have been on my usual "cancer watch", which is exhausting. While I look forward to spring, in the back of my head, I am worried about redoing my mammogram, which I will have to do, for fear that it will lead to another biopsy. I have other upcoming appointments too, and possibly tests. In a way, I hope to have some tests, otherwise I don't feel reassured about my health.
I think something that has been making me a bit sad is a problem with a friend, and it has been filling my heart with anguish.
A bright part of my winter was a weekend trip to Montebello with my family and our great friends, where our activities and food and our long conversations warmed us up. And helping Amrita play the piano. She is practicing for the her grade 1 exam as well as a duet she will be playing at the Kiwanis Festival. Her teacher is great but intense and it has meant a lot of work for Amrita and her home coach (me!). It is forcing me to rediscover playing the piano, and just like my dance class, it forces my brain to focus in a creative way and helps me to be in the present.
Also, I think I have taken two potential positive steps this winter.
The first is agreeing to participate in the psychological, clinical study at the hospital. I went for an interview and I am eligible to participate. I am not sure when it will begin - sometime in the spring or fall, if they can get enough participants. It is going to be a bit of a pain - I will have to take 2 hours off from work every week (at a time when our sick leave is being trimmed back to virtually nothing) and I will have to take a taxi back and forth to the hospital. The taxi will make me nauseaus, and the 7th floor of the General isn't my favourite place in the world. But I am hoping that the interventions they are testing may help me a little to manage my fear of cancer recurrence. And what I am hoping even more is that I will meet someone - someone who feels like I do. Someone I can talk to. Someone I can be friends with.
The second is that I think that, after several false starts, I have succeeded in starting on my novel. For all my life, all I have ever known is that I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to write a novel. I wrote and wrote so many things, but never my novel. And it is time to begin. I found an article about writing by Annie Dilliard, from her book The Writing Life, and it filled me with inspiration. She said to write like you are dying. I can do that. And she said to write something that someone who is dying would want to read if that is the last thing they could read. I don't have any grand subjects to write about. The novel I have in my heart is all about love and loss and redemption. It may not be what everyone who is dying would want to read, but it will have to be something that I would want to read, and it is up to me to write it.
S, it is time for me to begin. To begin another part of my life's work, and to hope that the spring will come.
P.S. Thank you to my friends who reached out and made me leave my desk to have lunch! I think it pushed me to examine of things and to start writing! Grateful.
