Life isn’t fair. It just isn’t. I recently found out that my dear friend and college roommate, M, has advanced-stage breast cancer, for which there is no cure. She was newly pregnant with her first child when she was first diagnosed last year, and she had to terminate the pregnancy to begin an aggressive round of chemo and an experimental stem-cell transplant at NIH. That seemed to have worked, and this spring, she accepted a job offer (ironically, she’s a brilliant and promising young oncologist) in Oregon, and was ready to house hunt when she found out that the cancer had returned, and–as she wrote to me recently–“the beast is moving quickly now.” Her news haunts me and has made it seem like a very dark week, despite the sunlight and spring flowers.
The only light has been my family–and especially Ava. She is so dear and so maddening and so funny and so frustrating, all at once. She’s so many things rolled into one right now, as she exists in this strange twilight between infancy and childhood. Mark and I have been so irked by her bad sleep patterns, which bring her into our bed every single night at 11:30 or so. And we’ve been baffled by her new, seemingly irrational fears of things like bird poop and flies. And her obsession with cutting paper.
But I never want to forget those things. I don’t want to forget her sweet sleeping face, so close to mine, with her night breath in my nose and her fingers twined in my hair. I don’t want to forget her endearing way of reassuring herself: “The grackle won’t come back and poop again, right, Mom? The grackle’s sleeping now. He won’t come back.” I don’t want to forget the way she cuts tiny paper triangles with her Hello Kitty scissors, leaving a snowstorm of white scraps on the floors of our house. I don’t want to forget the way she needs me, the way she yields to me when she is tired or afraid, pressing her whole body into mine, as I rub her back and soothe her.
How can another human being fill me up this much? And why have I been given the chance to experience this pure joy–while my friend M never will?