My Time

With the terrible news that Lisa was given this week, I have been thinking, a lot more then I usually let myself, about death.
My father died of melanoma, a young man who had just turned 53. They never found the origin of his disease. My Grandmother was just told she has a melanoma that she needs to have removed this week. We are fair skinned people, we are sun worshipers, we used sunscreen as kids but not vigilantly.

Is this the legacy my family has given me along with blue eyes and a quick temper?
I get my checkups, I tell my doctors about my family history like I talk about my grocery list, but I never feel safe.

My own cancer scare was enough to open my eyes to this terrible disease. You are never too young to get it. You can never be too young, exercise enough, eat healthy enough for cancer to pass you by.
It will come for you, when is the only question.

I was lucky, I escaped with a benign tumor but that is only after all my tests, biopsy and doctors all told me it was malignant.
I walked around for the weeks before my surgery with this tumor inside of me, and it was so strange. This lump that could kill me, leave my children motherless, my husband a widow and my mother having to deal with the worst thing in life-losing a child was just there as we waited. All the while I did my grocery shopping, cleaning and I played with my kids, but I could not stop thinking about the poison that I thought was inside my body.
Perhaps it was the alternative treatments I did before my surgery that made the poison harmless, perhaps it was luck or maybe it just wasn't my time- yet.

If cancer runs in your family do you get checked out more often? Do you ever feel safe?
I try to live my life, just be in the moment and I try to push back the voices in my mind that say "soon it will be your turn".

A Life Worth Living

I watched a documentary on Wednesday night called Crazy Sexy Cancer. Really I only watched the middle, I had missed the beginning and didn't watch the end because E came to bed and I thought I could tape it when it was on again, so I can see it in its entirety. Bad move on my part because it is not airing again as far as I and Tivo can tell.

It was about a 31 year old single woman who was diagnosed with a rare and incurable cancer. She was told it was slow growing, but incurable. Eventually she would die from it. Just for a second, try and imagine that.

I wondered what I would do faced with this knowledge. Would I use my fight or flight instincts? Could I live the rest of my life, however long, with the thought that nobody would want to be my partner in life. Who would want to marry damaged good with an expiration date? Would I look for alternative means to help save my life? Would I ever find peace in knowing that there will be an end, and I have lived my life, however short, the way I wanted.

Faced with your own mortality maybe would get people to do what they always wanted, but put off. Climb a mountain, dive from an airplane, learn to speak another language, tour the world. Soak everything in, so as to try to remember all your sights in eternity.
Why can't we live like that now? As if every day was our last? It is great in theory but that is not who we are, mundane life gets in the way, chores, work, just....life.

No matter how long you live, especially for people who have died so very young, could it ever be enough? Could you have lived enough, experienced enough, touched enough lives? That is what I think the filmmaker was going for, to leave her own legacy, to say "you are not alone" to so many other people out there, to make you think. It certainly made me think about how I want to live my life. It was a fantastic film and I really hope the air it again.

So, I ask you besides spending time with your family, which is obvious, what is one thing you would you do, if you had all the resources, before you die?



I know by your comments on my last post you peeps think I am depressed, I am not, I am just in an extreme lazy period. Akin to Picasso's blue period. I am a true artist at laziness.
If that depression commercial doesn't make you feel well, depressed, I want whatever you are drinking, because no matter how good of a mood I am in, it is depressing as hell!