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 doesn’t know me and

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 of our cla

Alaska swore in a new governor today. I remember the last inauguration day, four years ago. Alder and I returned from our Thanksgiving travels that morning after overnighting in Seattle and catching an early flight to Juneau. It was Monday and I made a half-hearted attempt to tell Alder he had to go to school. He was not having it.  “If you don’t go to school, you have to come with me to the inauguration,” I said, deciding on the spot to go to Centennial Hall for the ceremony. A foot of new snow lay on the ground. “And you have to wear your boots,” I added. Alder was six. He hated boots then and hates them still.  “Fine,” he said.  We unpacked, scrounged among the fridge rot for something to eat, and walked three-quarters of a mile through glittering snow to Centennial Hall, arriving about two minutes early. I scrambled around searching for an empty seat, found one on the center aisle and dove in, pulling Alder onto my lap just as the event began. I later realized I’d j

Thank you, friends and family near and far, for your expressions of caring and concern over the past weeks. I am feeling much better physically though I am still on multiple drugs, semi-bedrest and my self-prescribed anti-inflammation diet. It would be useful to know which of these tortures is/are the key to my heart sac’s happiness – but I don’t want to find out the hard way, so clean eating, continued slothfulness, and a slow tapering of my medications is on order.   Shortly after posting my last missive, I came across something I wrote a year ago that, oddly enough, seemed to presage the theme of my most recent post. I guess I have been grappling for some time with this notion of when and how we show weakness. With that I will share this little ski-season story-within-a-story that I wrote last year... -- The chairlift lurched to a stop shortly after Alder and I got on. We dangled in the air for an uncomfortably long time and I began to regret getting on the lift. We’d been