Life is what happens when you're making other plans
A week ago, I had my next blog entry all planned out. "I now know the most beautiful word in the English language," I intended to write. "It's 'benign'."
Except that it wasn't.
I wish I had happier news to write about. "Malignant" is an ugly word, and an uglier reality. But it's my father's reality now. Denying or sugar-coating it is not an option if I'm going to be of any use to him in this, the final stage of his life.
Please don't think that I'm abandoning hope by calling it that so baldly. I do hope. I hope for miracles and reprieves. I hope for the best treatment medical science has devised to yield the best possible results. I hope for many things, all of them bright and beautiful and good. "Hope is the thing with feathers," Emily Dicksonson wrote, and she was right. Hope can soar, even in a storm.
But my father is 66 years old. Whether treatment is a resounding success or not, this is the final stage of his life. That stage may last 20 years (that's the hope talking) or 20 months (that's the fear). The only thing certain is that it will end. Admitting that isn't the failure of hope, it's the shouldering of truth.
Heavy, sometimes, that truth thing. But liberating too. Truth clears your head. It cleans up your priority list. It shines a light on what matters, revealing all the trivial and petty things in life for exactly what they are: a waste of precious, precious time.
"Malignant" is an ugly word. But it's also a wake-up call.
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wordswoman) wrote,
