married. Actually, her disapproval is one of my favorite things; it adds an air of danger and naughtiness to the relationship, which it really doesn’t deserve. I like him a lot. I think I might even love him, but for the moment liking him is working just fine.
From: Katherine Emerson
To: Dr. Gray
Sent: Tuesday, April 11, 2012
6:02:07 A.M.
Greetings from the top of the world!
Get a load of this picture Stephen just took of me as the sun first peeked over the horizon. It is about the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. That lump behind me is Florence. Cute, isn’t she?
I had to write immediately to tell you, even though I have no idea when this will actually make it to you, that I have finally figured it out and I wanted you to be the first to know. You challenged me, before I came here the first time, to discover what makes life worth living. And I thought I did. I thought what makes life worth living is all the wonderful things that might happen. I could tell you weren’t crazy about that answer when I came home, and now I know why. I realize I was wrong. I realized it just now as I felt the sun brush my cheek.
So here it is.
What makes life worth living is not anything that might happen. It is what is happening right now. It is this moment, which I own every bit as much as anyone else. It doesn’t matter how many moments I have left; all that matters is right now I am as alive as I have ever been and as alive as anyone else, and this moment belongs to me as much as it does to anyone. And that’s what it’s about, whether you have cancer or not. What makes life worth living is what is happening right now.
Not yesterday, not tomorrow, right now.
I hope you’re proud of me, and I hope you’ll come soon for a visit. Right now I need to go. Stephen just finished cooking breakfast and we have a tight schedule if we’re going to make it down in time for our massage appointments. Give my love to New York, and if anyone should ask how I’m doing, tell them I’m having the best day of my entire life.
HEIDI
NIKKI WAS A MONTH shy of two when we met and she’s twelve now, so the math is easy to do. It was the first day of nursery school and Stacy and I were there with Nikki, and Heidi and Adam were there with Walker. Stacy and Heidi were both hugely pregnant, and as hugely pregnant women often tend to do in crowded places, they found each other. A few months later Heidi had Georgia and Stacy had Stevie, and after that what we had was a whole lot of fun together.
No one was more fun than Heidi was. Especially on skis. Heidi was as beautiful a skier as I have ever seen. And she was delightfully patient with me, even though I could barely keep up with her. My favorite memory of Heidi on skis was the time she implored me to ski faster by suggesting I chase her down the mountain as though I were James Bond and she a beautiful villain. I went after her as best I could, and any time I got close I could hear she was humming the James Bond theme as loudly as she could. It was so much fun.
I told that story at her memorial service.
If you, like I, believe there must be some justice in the universe, then you would have struggled as much as I did with what happened to Heidi. One day she was a wonderfully healthy, happy, sexy, outdoorsy, soccer-coaching mom and wife, the next day she had a pain in her back. By the time they figured out it was cancer that began in her breast and spread to her bones there was almost nothing they could do. When it spread to her brain, it was over. She died September 30th, 2009.
At the service held to celebrate her memory, before I told the James Bond story, I was sitting two rows behind Walker and Georgia and Adam and I was the angriest I can ever remember being. I had never witnessed anything that felt like more of an injustice. And then I sat and listened to the reading of what sounded like letters but I later found out were internet posts written