Nine Years and Counting

Recently the Chewelah golf course played host to a benefit tournament and silent auction for a local high school girl fighting cancer.  Talk about memories.  After nine years there are times when I forget how it felt, but when it comes back it feels like it all happened weeks ago rather than years.  Harder for the parents, siblings and friends in so many ways.  Someday I will write it all into a novel, or a memoir.  Everyone said I should then, but until recently it still seemed too close.  It's odd, but these days it is mostly the good things that I remember: the kindness of friends and family, nurses and doctors; making my oncologist laugh; the warmth of the heated blankets they wrapped around me; the feeling of peace when everything else is gone.  Especially the last.  For a year the future meant nothing.  The moment was everything, all there was.  It was the aftermath that was most difficult in many ways, learning how to plan again, to think of my life as something beyond today.


Of course I remember other things: weakness; nausea; allergic reactions which led to waking up in the ER stuck full of needles.  But these things don't last.  The pain subsides, until all that is left is a weird sense of wonder.  I am alive.  In my more philosophical moments I wonder why, then I realize that why doesn't really matter.  I am here, now.  It's the old lesson, still the same.  Apart from past pains and future worries, here I am.  Now, this moment, always.