R e m i s s i o n

Yesterday I received news that my annual CT scan was clear, and it settled in the strangest way. I felt relief, of course, but not the utter elation I’d expected. I say this because it wasn’t your typical scan; if clear, it would be likely be my last. And lo, it was! Yet I felt… so many different things. Which suggests that perhaps few emotions or experiences in life are unalloyed, though some have come close. Anticlimactic as the news was (sadly, medical test results aren’t sent with confetti effect), I still found myself wishing there was someone I could meet for a spontaneous drink to celebrate, but I didn’t know who that person would be at 2:45pm on a Monday. So, at a loss despite this seismic gain, I drove to pick up my daughter in the very same car in which I drove to pick her up after receiving my diagnosis five years ago with an uncannily similar sense of bewilderment. Wow, I thought to myself, I’m still here; I’m in remission; I’ve been cancer-free for 5 years. 5 years! It feels like a thousand lifetimes have transpired since my diagnosis in 2018–-so many awful and unexpected things have happened on both a global and personal scale that I’ve struggled to account for much of any of it. But I could no more account for the grace or good fortune that’s befallen me throughout my life, either. Account. That’s kind of funny. To whom? For whom? I suppose mostly for myself and maybe my daughter, in the event that she becomes curious about all of this when she’s older. I write these things down because then they live on the page, outside of me, and not solely inside, which can be overwhelming. And I share them here on the off chance that they might help someone else going through something similar, just as the few blogs I found my way to in the wake of my diagnosis helped me. To paraphrase James Baldwin, you feel alone in your suffering, and then you read. Or write. Or lean on others (those who helped me get here are countless and range from strangers to closest kin; I offer my gratitude to each and every one of them ❤️ ). Or walk the dog you once wondered if you’d live long enough to be able to have. Cheers to that.