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Does anyone actually say “ahoy” anymore?

Greetings from the Baltic!  I am currently on a very glassy sea, leaving Tallinn, Estonia, and headed for St. Petersburg, Russia, where we will dock tomorrow morning.  So far this cruise has been eventful and uneventful in the exact way one wishes when traveling.  No crises or disasters, and a lot of fun and educational moments shared with interesting people.  I have given two of my four lectures already, and I will not need to work again until after we leave St. Petersburg in a couple of days.

 

Attendance has been very good at my lectures–40 or more at each–and the feedback has been very positive. A highlight was a clip from a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream featuring a very young Judi Dench clad in very little but green paint and strategically placed leaves.  I’l try to attach the link here so you can share in the amusement!

 

Smooth seas to you all, wherever you are.  I will write again from St. Petersburg.

 

http://file:///Users/laurelweeks/Desktop/Judi%20Dench%20A%20Midsummer%20Night’s%20Dream%20Pt%202%20-%20YouTube.webarchive

 

 

I’m on my way in a couple of days for another round of cruise lectures, this time on Seabourn in the Baltic. I will try to post from the ship, but in my experience, signals can be iffy at sea, so perhaps I will end up saving up my comments until my return. If I can I will try to post photos as well. If you aren’t already a follower of “Laurel Corona, Author” on Facebook, please sign up, as I will probably also post there.

And on another matter, I have sent in my revisions of THE MAPMAKER’S DAUGHTER so we are right on track for a March 2014 publication date. I truly believe this is my best story, and it is definitely the one I most yearned to tell when I set out to become a novelist. I will write more about that soon as well. For now, it’s “to do” lists pretty much non stop until the plane leaves, so I will sign off with a wave for now and check in again soon.

Life has a way, doesn’t it?

It’s been a little over a year since I lost my beloved Jim to cancer, and exactly a year since I moved into a shabby-chic little rental near the San Diego Zoo.  I kept to my routine I established when I lived with him downtown near the bay, of walking to the college where I teach, passing every day by the rose garden that was one of Jim’s and my favorite stops on weekend afternoons.

 

I sprinkled some of his ashes under many of the rose bushes, and for several months I could still see signs of them under one yellow and one white rose bush. I have paused in front of those two bushes coming and going over this past year, just to say hello, catch Jim up on my life, and whisper my appreciation for him.

I think there is something profound about the idea of mourning for twelve months and a day, because getting through the anniversary is such a big step.  I have now done without him all holidays, birthdays, memories of special times, and have relived the pain of those last days and hours.  Slowly, I have moved on, found my balance, retrieved the spring in my step. Little by little I have found there is less to say when I stop, though I always brush my lips against one of the roses which have taken in what I brought of him to that spot. Amazing how much rose petals feel like lips, and how truly I felt kissed back.

I don’t cry anymore when I talk to Jim. The vision of him in his sailor cap smelling a flower is dimmer now. That’s all right.  It all still really happened.

Sometime this spring I learned that I would need to sign another year lease where I was living. Since I hadn’t planned to stay, but didn’t want to buy anything while I was unclear about my life, I decided the time was right to make the commitment of buying a place of my own.  Last week I moved into a beautiful one-bedroom condo on the other side of Balboa Park, with a spectacular view of downtown, the bay, Point Loma, and the ocean beyond.

I won’t be passing by the rose garden anymore, though I will be making the occasional special trip.  Instead, I bought a large armful of beautiful artificial yellow and white roses to put in my new home.  No, they don’t kiss as well, but they are a way of saying that we never completely say goodbye.

Perhaps, though, it’s a good thing for both of us that my move created a natural end to my stops in the garden. Jim, you are free to take on the universe without worrying about me anymore.  Now I am free to take on the other side of the park and the life that goes with it.

 

 

Well, here I am, back after an absence of many months.  For those of you who know me only through this website, the last you heard from me was when I was reeling from the death of my beloved partner and husband, Jim, last April.  I dropped out of sight over that summer and haven’t really given much thought to my life as a writer since.

 

The post below this one is something I wrote this week for another site, San Diego Writing Women, a group of which I am a proud member.  It will catch you up on my state of mind, so I will use this one to do the same for my professional life.  This one comes with a promise to pick up regular posting from now on!

 

I am happy to report that novel number four, which I finished before he died, sold last December to Sourcebooks, a Chicago-based publisher, and one of the most prestigious remaining indie houses.  I am very excited about being involved with this arm of the publishing industry, and working with my new editor, Shana Drehs. The novel is tentative called THE MAPMAKER’S DAUGHTER (I had titled it something else, and hope the subject is still negotiable, but we shall see), and should come out in early 2014.

 

As a result, 2013 will be a momentous year for me as an author, even if I don’t write anything new.  Soon I will be hard at work on revisions and the other aspects of editing THE MAPMAKER’S DAUGHTER for publication.  Perhaps that will whet my appetite for one of my many great ideas for future novels about forgotten women, and I will be writing here soon about my next project.  As I write this, I must admit, I feel a little stir of excitement about that possibility.

 

My other big news is that I have finally fulfilled a dream of many years to lecture on a cruise line.  Not only did I do that for the first time recently on Silversea Cruises (South America over last Christmas and New Year’s ), but I have gotten new contracts for other Silversea destinations over the next two holiday seasons, and another assignment this August on Seabourn in the eastern Mediterranean.

 

Those of you who have followed my blog here know that Jim and I were literally on the eve of leaving for Lisbon in September 2011 for what was to be my first lecturer gig on Silversea. As our plane took off without us, I was sitting instead at the hospital as doctors struggled to save Jim from imminent death from kidney failure.  Rather than luxuriating for the next few weeks on a cruise, we spent the time dealing with a serious health crisis and a diagnosis of metastatic prostate cancer.

 

I will always remember that time as one of the most painful and saddest in my life, but as my friends all know, I am blessed with the “happy gene” and have recovered well.  I am so grateful for my nine years with Jim, and even if I knew the end when we set out to spend life together, I would do it all again.  Not many people are lucky to be as loved as I have been, and to have the great feeling of loving someone equally in return.

 

Enough for now. Very glad to be back. Thank you for all your support!  Laurel

 

 

 

 

And soon a branch, part of a hidden scene,
The leafy mind, that long was tightly furled,
Will turn its private substance into green,
And young shoots spread upon our inner world.

 

These lines, the end of the poem “A Light Comes Brighter,” by one of my favorite poets, Theodore Roethke, was on my mind as I walked home from the college this week. It’s about the first signs of the end of winter, and indeed they can be found in San Diego already–despite the limited drama of changing seasons around here.

 

The first time these lines etched themselves into my consciousness was almost thirty years ago, when my home on a canyon rim was scorched by wildfire, leaving the yard looking like a huge ashtray and the trees scorched to a russet brown..  “It’s a miracle how the fire went around this house,” the reporter from the local news chirped from my driveway. My heroic neighbors, who had spent the afternoon on my roof with garden hoses, greeted that comment in muttered disgust: “Yeah, some miracle.”

 

I thought the trees were dead, but within a month, I saw a hint of something and went out to investigate.  There, in clusters of perfect little emeralds, was life reasserting itself.

 

When I see the first leaf buds or early blossoms every year, my heart lifts at the sheer doggedness of the will to live that had quietly been doing its work all winter. I often think of Roethke’s poem then, particularly the beautiful last line, where he reminds us of our own internal winters, and the green shoots that come up, often by surprise, to signal that perhaps it is time to put behind whatever has been dreary and cold, and regrow ourselves.

 

My daily walk to and from the college where I teach takes me past the Rose Garden in Balboa Park, and there is something about the brutality with which rose bushes are cut back in late December that always wounds me. Today the nodes are swelling and the first leaves are breaking out, turning their private substance into green, just as the gardeners with their faith and pruning shears, knew they would.

 

Last February I lived not just in a different home in a different part of town, but in a different world.  My beloved partner, Jim, was declining noticeably from the cancer that would steal his life in April. When June came, I cried because he was not there to see the jacarandas whose purple blooms he had always appreciated with the glee of a child.  There was only winter for me last summer.  There was even less for him.

 

But sap does rise and the juices of this beautiful life do surge again.  Somewhere between then and now, the sad, furled leaves of my grief and sorrow opened to reveal something lush and green and full of promise. It’s called life. It’s called understanding that we are still here, and rejoicing in that single, beautiful fact.  It’s what our own internal green shoots are trying to tell us as every season, every stage of life beckons.

 

A number of months ago, I wrote here that, “I can’t write about writing or the writing life today, because I am not doing any of the former, and as to the latter, I don’t have one.”  I’d have to say that’s still true.  I have been dormant. I haven’t written one word of fiction, or edited anything I had finished before Jim got sick. I’m perfectly okay with that, and have no sense of urgency and no plan to do anything different for now.

 

In the poem, such a time is called winter, but for me, life is not cold and dreary, it’s simply not the season for the pen. In the last few months it’s been the right time for lecturing on a cruise line, seeing movies, taking up golf, making some new friends, palling around with old ones, and starting to think about loving again.

 

I don’t speculate about my writing future, although my friends seem certain I have one. Blessings on you for your confidence and support.  Maybe you are right, but unlike the roses in Balboa Park that shared their wisdom with me this week, I am not stuck with being able to produce only one kind of flower.

Since my husband’s death in April, I have had one of life’s most important jobs: finding my way back to happiness.

 I have always believed it is my obligation to the universe to thrive, and when grief, trauma, or misfortune hit, I treat recovery as requiring the same intensity of attention and commitment I pay to my work as a writer and professor.

It should be obvious that sifting through all the thoughts and emotions that engulf one at such times is hard mental (and sometimes physical) labor. Still, when I tell people that I am working hard on being happy again, generally they seem confused.  “How do you work at being happy?” they ask. “Isn’t that a bit of an oxymoron?”

Since people really seem to want to know what I mean, I’ll try to explain.  We think of gravity as the force that brought Newton’s apple down, but the root word, “gravitas” simply means heaviness. Sorrow, dissatisfaction, grief, displeasure are all weighty burdens causing us slip easily into a hole it’s hard to climb out. What we need is a counterforce to lift us up. Gratitude, for me, is a force powerful enough to ride all the way out of that hole, defying gravity in a whole new way.

Why is it important to practice gratitude?  Because anything else is an insult to the universal force (whatever one believes it to be) that, as Jews say in the blessing known as Shehekiyanu, “creates us, sustains us, and enables us to reach this day.”

For those less cosmically inclined, gratitude is also practical: time spend outside a state of gratitude is time in which we are not healing.  Anger, remorse, guilt, wishful thinking, even grief that focuses only on loss–are all hindrances to finding the peace that must come before any real happiness.

So I worked (and continue to work) at reconciling myself with how it could be that a healthy, active, lusty, and adventurous man had been invaded by a mutation that ate him alive and left him an emaciated and sallow corpse in a hospice bed just seven month after his diagnosis.  Why it was that he had the bad luck to have such an aggressive strain of prostate cancer that even therapies that usually add several years to the life of patients added not a day to his.

There isn’t a why.  What is, is.  Jim knew this and said it often, not just about his cancer, but about everything he couldn’t change. I am so lucky to have spent the last eight years with a man who thought that way, for I realize now what a blessing it is to have an  outlook that makes practicing gratitude natural.

What is, is.

Isn’t that the heart of the matter?  Don’t we have to accept reality before we can find our way out of the holes into which life knocks us from time to time?

Jim and I practiced gratitude together until the end. As to the cards we had been dealt in life, any complaints simply died in our throats.  Jim’s life gave him seven decades of opportunities, accomplishments, and many joys.  He got to practice the science he loved in a lab that his many achievements kept funded.  He did well enough financially to be able to afford a 40-foot Valiant sailboat and a beautiful Ventus glider, both of which gave him outlets for his boundless energy and centers for his identity.  He traveled widely and read eclectically. He had the good sense to keep his wishes modest and within his means.  We treated each other with the respect we hadn’t always gotten in previous relationships, which gave us an opportunity to heal each other’s wounds.  Jim left this world honored and treasured by his family and friends, and deeply loved by me.

That was his reality.  This is mine.  I must face life without him, but I had an extraordinary and precious person in my life for a while.  Eight years was not as long as we hoped, but it will have to be enough. I lost my love, but I had an experience of love that many people never get.

Life has given me six decades of opportunities beyond measure, successes of countless kinds, resources of every sort with which to face up to problems, and the vision to see and accept challenges as chances to make something wonderful happen.  Straw into gold, lemons into lemonade, loss into gain, defeat into victory.  All it takes is seeing it that way.  Otherwise, straw, lemons, loss, and defeat just stay what they are.

I haven’t been either a Pollyanna or a Queen of Denial about my loss.  I cried buckets at the beginning, and I still get teary (although briefly) most days. For a time, I did all I could to stay in that liminal world between being alive and dead, grasping at chances to feel I was with him again, if only for a moment. I still chat with him in my head, but acknowledge that the talk is therapy for me, independent of whether he is there to hear it.  No, his death is real, and I have struggled hard, and so far successfully, to let him–and me–move on.

When I experience something beautiful, or amusing, or touching, I think of how much Jim would enjoy it, and I often cry.  What my thinking comes quickly around to, however, is that those beautiful, amusing, and touching moments are in this world here and now, and so am I.

Our wounds move away from front and center in our lives when we put the past in an honored place, but don’t try to live there. I am ready and excited to continue reinventing myself, to make new friends, begin new activities, and–who knows?–perhaps even find love again. So I move forward, saying an ongoing thank you to the universe for Jim’s life and my own, and for the countless blessings of this and every day.

Shantih. Shalom. Peace.

 

I can’t write about writing or the writing life today, because I am not doing any of the former, and as to the latter, I don’t have one.

Eight months ago, my beloved partner (and more recently husband) was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer.  Though incurable, for most men his age (72), it’s likely to progress slowly enough that they die of something else.  Jim didn’t have that kind.  His was so invasive it left the doctors astonished, and took his life in less than eight months.

When he was diagnosed I was just finishing the first draft of a new book, and as the prognosis began to look grimmer, I set it aside and did not look at the file again. I couldn’t justify spending any time in a made-up world when I had my beautiful, gentle, loving, and utterly precious love still with me.

 

I still haven’t opened that file, and have no desire to do so. Nothing seems quite real to me now except the actual world in the present tense, and it requires such tremendous effort that there is nothing left over to call upon.  And, surprisingly, I am fine without writing–so fine it is difficult to imagine feeling driven in the same way again.

People say not to make important decisions in the throes of catastrophic events, so I will just say I don’t know what direction my writing life will go.  All I know is that when I make a list of the things that are important to getting myself back on my feet and launched into the next chapter of my life, writing novels is not on the list.  Perhaps that is the exact wrong thing to say on a website devoted to writers and writing, in the company of writing women whom I admire professionally and love as friends, but one thing life has shown me is that under stress, honesty is the only thing I have energy for.

So we will see.

“What was the outcome?” we often ask, as if there is some sort of linear end to matters, a convenient wrap-up that restores our faith that life is a predictable narrative, even if that predictability can only be seen after the fact.

The outcome of the last eight months, since that awful September day when we heard the dreaded “C” word, is that Jim died.  But the thing about outcomes is that they really aren’t.  They are thresholds.  Maybe that’s what we should say instead.

I don’t know what the outcome of Jim’s death is.  I know how I feel right now–or maybe I really don’t.  Our culture doesn’t give us much opportunity or practice in speaking of the nuances of feeling.  I am a writer, and my own vocabulary for such things is pathetic.  I am sad.  I am grief stricken. I am at loose ends….

Pathetic.  Told you so.

I am standing in a doorway.  Thinking about the past makes me sad.  The future without Jim makes me sad too. The only thing I can do anything about is the present, and exigencies are dictating most of that to me as well.

There are no outcomes, only thresholds.  As Goethe put it, “nothing is worth more than this day.”  How much will yours be worth?

 

It’s easy for non-writers to understand how writing can be an emotional experience, but most people who went to college probably remember research papers as dry-eyed experiences–especially if they involved all-nighters!

I can’t imagine any historical novelist sticking with a topic that didn’t leave him or her speechless from time to time, needing to step away and let the magnitude of some events seep into a mind reluctant to believe.  I have had many such moments, beginning with my first trade book, Until Our Last Breath, a nonfiction work on Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, through my sixth, the just-completed novel The Intuitive.

The latter provides the freshest moments of emotionally wrenching research, and I want to share one of those with you now and the second in a subsequent post.

Ever since reading the late Stephen Jay Gould’s magnificent 1981 work, The Mismeasure of Man many years ago, I’ve known about the history of intelligence testing, and the blatant racism, sexism, and classism that went into early efforts to stratify people by intelligence (and therefore worth). American scientists were major participants in this, as a means of justifying slavery, and later to support anti-immigration sentiments.  In the early twentieth century, an American psychologist, H.H. Goddard, known as the father of modern eugenics, received permission to conduct research at Ellis Island, whereby women he considered gifted with special powers of intuition would scan incoming immigrants and identify on sight those they believed were feebleminded.  Few could pass tests that were so out of the realm of their life experience, and those who could not were deported.

I read Gould’s book long before I had any idea I would become a novelist, but I was so moved by the vision of the “intuitives” at Ellis Island that years later the story of these women and their impact on other people’s lives jumped to mind as something important to tell. The topic had to stand in line, however, and finally in 2011 I got around to it.

But the teary-eyed part of the research didn’t come from reviewing Gould.  It came when I was digging further into Goddard’s most famous work, a 1912 study of a young woman, “Deborah,” from a family living in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey whom he called the Kallikaks.  She was the central case study in his theory that “feeblemindedness” was inherited from shiftless, criminal ancestors, and the only way to avoid moral and intellectual degeneration in America was to build colonies where the current generation could live away from “good” society and, most important, be kept from breeding.

“Deborah” came to the Vineland School for Feebleminded Boys and Girls when she was eight. She was never permitted to leave because it was believed that “morons” (a term Goddard coined) had no moral sense and would fall into criminality if left on their own. She was treated as retarded her entire life, though the many abilities she showed, including excellent skills as a tailor, were commented favorably upon and she became a kind of unpaid assistant to the staff.

What took my breath away was the conclusion of contemporary psychologists looking at  “Deborah’s” file. They believe she was not retarded at all, but had a learning disability affecting her performance on the kinds of tests they were using to judge her.  The file is full of laudatory references to her many capabilities, but nowhere does anyone appear to have questioned whether she should have had her freedom taken away. Though life on the outside was not that pleasant for any working woman, still there’s something about that story that sucks all the oxygen out of the room.

And of course Deborah was not alone.  All over the country, men were institutionalized for being gay, and women for being “hysterics, which often meant no more than being defiant.  All over the country one could go to jail for loving a person of another race.  All over the country, Jews and people of color found doors slammed in their faces.  “Life is so nice the way it is,” was the cry of the comfortable.  “Why do all of you want to spoil everything for us?”

The Intuitive has a fictional protagonist, wealthy socialite Zorah Baldwin, who serves as one of Goddard’s “intuitives” at Ellis Island. Through her work there and a budding friendship with “Deborah” that begins during a visit to the Vineland School, Zorah breaks out from the narrow world she grew up in, to explore the realities of the Lower East Side and the exploding social issues of the time, including Women’s Suffrage which I will discuss in my next post.

And of course, for her to do that, I had to explore these realities first, taking a lot of breaks to catch my breath, as I staggered my way through some history I think most of us would prefer not to know too much about.  But since my self-appointed job as a historical novelist is to bring to light forgotten women, I present a bit of the good, the bad, and yes, the ugly in my new work.  The Intuitive is with my agent now, and I will keep you posted here and more frequently on my “Laurel Corona, Author” page on Facebook.

 

 

 

One time when I was growing up, my sister and I, newly old enough to stay home alone for a few hours, were “terrorized” after dark by a neighbor on the front porch dropping off something he had borrowed from my dad. We stayed huddled in the bathroom for what seemed like an eternity until our parents got home, arming ourselves only with a flashlight we planned by some childish logic to defend ourselves with if the intruder broke down the door.

 

At least there really was a presence outside–unlike later, when I would cower in bed after watching a scary movie, convinced that whatever had menaced the characters was about to get me.  Why is it that the typical and familiar “things that go ‘bump’ in the night” are transformed into something diabolical just by the act of storytelling?  Try as one might to rationalize that watching a movie does not compromise one’s safety in the real world, that a monster or psychopath isn’t lurking out there ready to pounce on the hapless soul with the misfortune to have just watched something scary, it just never seems to keep the fears at bay.

 

There’s something equally irrational about writing under the kind of personal stress I have been facing since my partner, Jim, was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer.  I was finishing the first draft of a new novel as the news was unfolding, and it has caused me to look at my work with some of the same fears–fears that try as I may, I cannot dispel with logic, or a heroically wielded flashlight.

 

I don’t know whether to trust my writing anymore. We’re talking about words written before I even knew Jim was ill, so it’s not like I could have been shellshocked as I typed.  I remind myself that the manuscript hasn’t changed just because other things have, but somehow I feel more vulnerable and confused, more doubting of my ability to judge.

 

What’s weird is that I can’t figure out what I am worried about. There’s nothing about my writing future that is at stake here. I don’t have a deadline looming.  I don’t depend on the income (thank goodness!) With three published novels, I don’t have any goal I haven’t already achieved.  I think my anxiety isn’t about my writing at all, really. It’s about the great unspeakable behind all this. The D word.  The one with five letters that rhymes with breath.

 

There’s another “D” word relevant here too: Displacement.  Maybe that’s what’s going on–I am acting out in one sphere what is freaking me out in another.

 

I tell myself that it is my choice whether to let the future ruin today.  Just live. Appreciate.  Be thankful. I’m hearing myself pretty well most of the time. It’s the bogeyman of uncertainty that’s got me.  What’s certain is that the man I love, with whom I have had one of the best chapters of my life, cannot be cured.  What’s certain is that, unless something unexpected takes him from me even sooner, the expected will take him soon enough. What’s uncertain is all the details. Will he be strong and enjoying his life a year from today? Two years?  How long until he wonders whether it’s worth it to soldier on? How long until I will be alone?

 

Yes, I know nothing is ever certain, and some kinds of uncertainty are good and even productive. Sometimes what we don’t know truly doesn’t hurt us.  This is not one of those times. At least I don’t think it is, unless the future is uglier than I think, and I’m not, repeat NOT, thinking that.

 

So I’m taking it out on my manuscript, wondering whether words–or events–will ever be the way I want them again. Writing is something I can control, though, at least a little, and even as I type this, I long to escape into it. Time to put down the flashlight and come out of the bathroom armed with nothing but a story. No need to utter a frightened “who’s there?”  It’s only me. And I don’t like any of this.  Not one bit.

Once again, I am wondering where the time has gone since I last posted. In my last entry, a lifetime ago, I described the shock of finding myself in the hospital as the ship sailed on the eve of a three-week adventure I’d been dreaming of for over a year, while my beloved partner struggled with acute kidney failure. The part I didn’t add was that the kidney failure was caused by blockage from newly discovered cancer in his prostate.  Advanced. Incurable. Highly virulent.  Quickly invasive.

I guess we all know we aren’t going to live forever, but learning what is likely to kill us or someone we love, and in roughly how much time, is brutal.  Fortunately the prognosis is still measurable in plural years, but that’s about all I know.

I forced myself to finish a first draft of novel number five, THE INTUITIVE, just so I didn’t have an uncompleted story hanging over me, then without any of the usual fanfare, I just set it aside.  I’ll get to it sometime. Priorities.  I need to keep my head clear.  I need to live up to my own expectations of myself as a teacher.  I need to be there for Jim, whatever he needs.

I often catch myself wishing some event in the future would come more quickly–the end of the semester, a much anticipated event, a visit, a piece of news.  Then I pull back on the reins of my desires and remind myself how finite time is and how quickly the clock is ticking.  Why should I possibly want it already to be mid-December?  Don’t I want all the time in between?

Especially now.

This isn’t the first overwhelming crisis I’ve dealt with, and I’ve noticed two basic ways people respond to their own problems and those of others.  The first is catastrophizing and the second is rosy denial.  This doesn’t correlate to simple pessimism and optimism, though, at least for me.  I am one of the most sunny and cheerfully optimistic people you’ll ever meet, but I still fall into the first category, at least initially.

It works well for me to imagine the worst.  It enables me to preview my emotions, think of strategies and plans, remind myself what grief feels like.  I envision Jim’s treatments not working, I picture the markers of his decline. I place this in concrete time–next summer, next fall, next year. I picture the end.  I think about life without him. I imagine my own end, and know that unlike him I may face it without a loving partner. I hate every minute of all this, but I stay there as long as I need to, just to keep myself oriented and rational.

Then–and here is the important part–I tell myself it’s highly unlikely to be as bleak as that.  I dial back the catastrophe.  I tell myself the worst is almost certainly not what is in store for either of us.  Some things we can control.  Others we can assume won’t happen, or won’t be as awful as they could be.

That’s why it can be hard to deal with all the sweet and wonderful people who try to help  by saying that the treatments designed to keep the cancer at bay for several years could give scientists enough time to find a cure, those who tell me about all the exceptional cases, all the “miracles,” all the people still alive after ten or twenty years. I know it’s done out of love for me, mingled with a large dose of their own fears, but it’s very draining.   It’s a bit like when I lost loved ones and ended up spending my limited energy listening to things that might have made other people feel better but only exhausted me.  Things that, in an odd twist,  made me feel like the consoler rather than the consoled.

I have on occasion called myself an optimistic fatalist, and though that might sound weird, to me it makes perfect sense.  I can’t change what will be, but the one thing I am confident of is that I will weather it somehow.