serves to defeat the purpose, which is to live. Not just to stay alive, to live. As I, and only I, define living. I don’t tell anyone else how they should define it, and I don’t ask for advice, either.
For me, happiness is the only goal I can imagine. I don’t really have any others. Some people pursue happiness in boardrooms or on mountaintops, they spend their lives negotiating and climbing, and it seems to me what they are doing is looking for happiness in the profits and the pretty views. But I don’t need to look so far away for happiness. I have it here, all around me, every day, nearly every minute. I don’t need to accomplish anything in order to feel happy. Happiness is not something I hope to discover along the way to vague, distant goals; happiness is a means to its own end. It is the destination, the only one worth striving for, at least that’s the way I see it and I tell my kids that all the time. The only thing I wish for you is happiness. I don’t care if they are ambitious, athletic, or academic. I don’t care if they want to be doctors or schoolteachers or garbage collectors; I only want them to be happy. Living happily ever after is always the best ending. Any story that ends differently isn’t worth telling, as far as I’m concerned.
So, sometimes I think to myself: How dare she try to tell me how to live my life?
Cancer, I mean.
Not Samantha. I love her for trying to tell me how to live my life. She’s young enough not to have learned that there are different ways of thinking, and she’s sweet enough to care. I appreciate her for both of those. I don’t get angry with her when she pesters me about my decisions, which she does less and less frequently anyway. That’s nice. Now we can just be friends. Perhaps someday she’ll meet Scott and my kids. I think she’d like that, and I would too. Perhaps we could double-date, if things progress with Dr. Marks, which I have a funny feeling they are going to.
Actually, it’s more than a funny feeling, more like a premonition. Or a matter of faith. Something good has to come from what I’ve been through. Perhaps this is what it is meant to be. Perhaps Dr. Marks and Samantha will marry and they’ll have a son or a daughter who becomes a brilliant scientist who discovers the cure for cancer, and it would never have happened if I hadn’t become sick and met Samantha and fixed her up with Andrew.
So, it’s not Samantha who infuriates me. It is cancer. How dare this disease, this creeping, crawling creature I can neither see nor feel, show up unannounced and uninvited and start dictating all this change. Cancer has a whole list of ways in which my life is going to be different, a list of things I need to do, a list of things I will never do again. Even now, when it is no longer inside me, it wants to tell me how to behave so it will never return.
Well, guess what: I’m not listening. I have my own plans and my own schedule and I will deal with cancer on my own terms, no one else’s. If I choose to drive car pools and chaperone class trips and get my hair blown out every Saturday night and talk dirty to my husband on the phone when he is away, then that is exactly what I’m going to do, with apologies to no one and absolutely no second thoughts.
And to anyone who judges me, I simply say: Mind your own business.
And to cancer, I simply say: FUCK YOU.
KATHERINE
I LOOK BEAUTIFUL.
There really aren’t three better words in the English language than those, are there?
Even I love you isn’t always better. Hell, I’ve probably had more pain and suffering as a result of I love you than I have any three other words, with the exception of You have cancer, and even that may be a toss-up.
Right now, I’ll take I look beautiful, because it’s been so long since I’ve said them, or thought them, or even thought about them.
It starts with the wig, which is fabulous. I can’t decide now why I resisted it. It is long and blond and wavy—it’s like having Charlize Theron’s hair in the blink of an eye. And I love it.
But it isn’t only