entering the realm of a friendship that I hope will endure for years to come. It is a privilege to have been cared for by Dr. C. It is even more of a privilege to know and be inspired by such a good and courageous human being, who wants to, and indeed does, make a true difference in the lives of everyone she touches. In spending time with Dr. C., I was happy because I didn’t expect to be. I was happy because out of cancer had come this new relationship and a new understanding about another human being who had already been so important to me and my family. I was happy because through knowing and talking to her I felt in those moments an enrichment of my life and soul.
The sudden prospect of a shortened life and imminent death seems to have the power to do that. Relationships are accelerated—acquaintances can become intimates in an afternoon. Because there is no time to waste, and what is more important than intimacy?
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the moments when I’ve been the happiest in my life. You might expect me to say it was the moment I married Josh, or the moment I held each of my squirming daughters for the first time. Alas, no—sorry, Josh and Mia and Belle. As honest as I am, I have to admit that marriage and bringing forth life, while filled with joy, were too fraught with anxiety to be truly and purely happy moments. I wondered, subconsciously anyway, as I stood by Josh’s side in my pretty white dress, whether our relationship would endure. As I learned to hold my firstborn against my body, I wondered if I were going to break her fragile body or otherwise fail her as a mother. It would have been naïve and arrogant of me not to have those thoughts then.
No, when I think of the happiest moments of my life, free from anxiety and worry, I think of the time I sat atop a hillside with three Tibetan monks in the distant province of Gansu, China, at age nineteen, listening to the haunting chants from the monastery below. I think of sitting in a Zodiac on Thanksgiving Day 2005, making my way through white, green, and blue water toward the Antarctic coast under the brightest sky and sun I’d ever seen, to meet hundreds of wild penguins. I think of riding on a bicycle rickshaw along the country roads of Bangladesh too narrow for a car, under a star-filled sky with hundreds of fireflies lighting our path. These were the most euphoric moments of my life, moments when I was at peace, however briefly, when I had no worries about my past or my future, when I had traveled alone long and often difficult distances to reach my destination, when I felt gratitude in the breathtaking beauty I was so privileged to behold, when I felt like my soul was expanding to encompass a rare and even divine part of the human experience, to see and feel places of such extraordinary natural wonder that they must surely have been touched by the hand of God.
As shocking as it may seem, cancer has brought me moments of happiness. My moment of happiness with Dr. C. wasn’t so different from the moments of happiness I’d experienced during my travels before cancer. While cancer has the capacity to tarnish my happy moments with my children, to taint them with doubts about the future, cancer also has an incredible ability to strip away the ugliness and the things that don’t matter and to put everything in a perspective as bracingly clear as that Antarctic sky. With Dr. C., I forgot about the dreariness of that restaurant. I forgot about the uncertainty of my future. Instead, cancer gave me an ability to focus on the present, to really listen to everything Dr. C. told me, to enjoy and marvel at her stories and her as a human being and our human connection. And because cancer forces me and others to refocus on what matters, what I have found, as with Dr. C., are people coming forward to strengthen and reestablish old relationships or establish new ones—former doctors, high school classmates, fellow parents, distant friends, people I’ve never even met. It is these relationships in my life, a life that for better or for worse is so defined by cancer now, that matter to me most these days, that