An improvised life

Last week during my twice-yearly boob check, my breast oncologist said, “Everything happens for a reason.” I can’t remember what precipitated it. I might have been saying my pericarditis still has me running scared. [1] I might have been saying I’m a little down. I was taken aback.  Are you shitting me? Did she really just say that? It felt dismissive and disrespectful. I don’t find it comforting, and I don’t believe it’s true. Does child sexual abuse have some silver lining? Does murder happen for some pre-ordained reason? It feels like whitewash, denial of another person’s reality, and bullshit. Among other things.  As these thoughts and feelings gathered like a duststorm inside, all I could say was, “No, I don’t believe that. I don’t think my husband died for a reason.”  “It depends on your faith,” Dr. S allowed. She said something like in time I will see the positives that grew from these things that seem hard.  I felt my teeth grind. She d...

I went to my 25 th college reunion last weekend – I reluctantly signed up for one event, leery of the pompous middle-aged people my Harvard classmates had undoubtedly become and convinced I remembered no one and nothing of my undergraduate experience.  But I stayed past midnight Thursday, and stopped in Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Twenty-five years out, life has bruised us all in some way, and we are more secure in who we are. It makes for better conversations than the exchange of resumes I recall from the only other reunion I attended, 5 or 10 years out. I talked to a friend of a friend who is a psychiatrist and whose own partner developed debilitating mental illness six years into their relationship. I talked to a classmate who said his work as a rabbi calls him to help people in the best and worst moments of their lives, and most of the time he can do little but be present and open. I learned another friend had grown up in a magic-show cult.   I learned that 22 o...