How ARE you?
Truly, it’s strange that such a simple question is so hard
to answer. On a day-to-day level, it changes all the time. If you ask me in
passing, the answer might be a simple status report: “fine,” “not bad,” “a little
tired,” or “crappy.” If we are sitting together over a cup of tea, I might go a
little deeper, talking about how treatment takes a toll over time, or about how
my kids are doing. But this doesn’t really get to the heart of the question.
Because the heart of the question has to do with the bizarre
incongruence between how I look, which is seemingly fit, normal, with no
outward signs of illness, and the dire diagnosis that I’ve been given. It
doesn’t fit. It doesn’t make sense. And no matter how many times we try to make
the two truths intersect, it is never less challenging to find that ven diagram
where “She just hiked 11 miles” and “She has advanced breast cancer” overlap.
Believe me, it doesn’t make sense to me either.
I’m fine for now. I went to yoga this morning. We took the
kids boogie-boarding last weekend when it was 82 degrees in Morro Bay. We sat
on the patio at night and looked at the stars. At the same time, I get an ache
in my hip and I wonder to myself, “am I sore from yoga?... or is that bone
metastasis?” I can be in the middle of cooking a meal and laughing with friends,
and still, in another register of my mind, there is a constant monologue going,
a thrum of “how long will this last?”
