Quote of the Day: “The only limit of our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Today, Lynne’s son and daughter-in-law welcomed a beautiful baby boy into the world, Paxton Wayne Starley. My heart ached for Lynne because she wanted to experience grandchildren so badly. I know she is smiling upon this happy union of baby and parents. I have felt her spirit all day and feel satisfied that she is happy.
I am very much enjoying having Taylor home. He has been a great sport as he has been thrust back into life here in SLC. He arrived home on Thursday night, almost first off the plane. One of the first questions Mike asked him was “Did you like your seat?” Mike had gone into Taylor’s reservation and changed his seat assignment making sure he had a window. Mike said: “I wanted you to see the mountains as you were coming back home.” The next day, Mike arrived to take Taylor to the “U” where he helped him find his classes, took him to the bookstore for book purchases and secured a parking pass. Taylor commented: “Mike’s never been this nice to me before”. I could tell this made Taylor a bit uneasy. I’m certain Taylor is looking over his shoulder, waiting for the real Mike to appear. So far, it hasn’t happened.
Do you know what the letters FMO are an acronym for? I’m quite sure I’ve suffered from it in the past and worry about suffering with it in the future. Fear of missing out. Have you experienced this? It dawned on me that for most of last year, I didn’t dare let myself imagine the future. Forget dreaming about all the adventures you want to take or how your family will grow and change. I had to keep reminding myself that I couldn’t go there, that I didn’t have that luxury. Later in the year, I started to indulge myself and began picturing the future with me in it. I think that’s got to be one of the hardest parts of having a disease that can take your life. I would sit there and look at my family and picture them growing old all the while wondering if I would be absent. And it didn’t feel fair. It didn’t seem right that I wouldn’t be able to be laughing and enjoying life among them. And, of course, I tried to imagine what that was like for Lynne, what it must have felt like to be in her shoes, how that must have pained her.
One thing that I did come to understand last year is that you really have to allow yourself to go through all these experiences that life throws at you, no matter how hard, and try to make some sense of them, try in our limited human way of seeing things to understand how they make us feel. I was listening to This American Life a few weeks ago and was struck by what David Rakoff said about testing one’s character. He recently passed away from cancer, and what struck me as particularly sad is that he was diagnosed with cancer in his 20s, then went through treatment, and then the cancer returned two decades later as a result of that treatment. I love his writings, here’s what he said when he spoke about his first experience with cancer:
“They say that times of crisis are the true test of one’s character. I really wouldn’t know, since my character took a powder that year, leaving in its stead a jewel-bright hardness. I was at my very cleverest that year– an airless, relentless kind of quipiness. Every time a complex human emotion threatened to break the surface of my consciousness, out would come a joke. Come on, give us a smile.
There was a period during the illness when I was at my very sickest, at 115 pounds, hovering in and out of consciousness. This month and a half was the one period in my life when I was not faking it– where I was not deflecting every emotion with repartee. That it would take millions of cancer cells lining up for their big Esther Williams finale in my lymphatic system for me to finally shut up is sobering– or would be, were I to think about it, which, of course, I choose not to.
What remains of your past if you didn’t allow yourself to feel it when it happened? If you don’t have your experiences in the moment, if you gloss them over with jokes or zoom past them, you end up with curiously dispassionate memories, procedural and depopulated. It’s as if a neutron bomb went off, and all you’re left with are hospital corridors.”
I’m ending with a darling picture of a new dad, Matt Starley. Look at the hope in his face as he imagines the future for this beautiful, new soul!
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