Thanks For Being Part of My Tribe
This week, I was trying to make some goals for the future. I was imagining that I could beat this terminal diagnosis and that I could risk going off treatment and make a five-year plan to get a second house in Calabria, Italy. We’ve been watching videos about living in and housing in Calabria. We’ve been dreaming and planning, like I did with the Dalmatian puppy. But I have to be realistic about my diagnosis too. It’s hard with metastatic cancer knowing what to do – do I take risks with my treatment or stay with what is tried and true? Do I believe I have truly been given a miracle and quit treatment, at least for a while? Do I die happy in Italy? Do I get treatment again if it comes back, even though going off treatment might shorten my life? Or do I stay on treatment the rest of my life, even if it kills me before the cancer does? It always gets me wondering about another difficult question about what is best – to know if you’re going to die within a certain amount of time or to die unexpectedly. And after last night, I know that the answer, for me, is to have warning, to know that I might die soon, or relatively soon with a metastatic cancer diagnosis. I know this because I lost someone in my tribe yesterday. I lost a good friend from high school, a lifelong friend. I woke up in the middle of the night and read a text from one of my girlfriends wondering if I had gotten the news from another friend. The message from my other friend notified me and our tribe that our friend Barry had died unexpectedly. I couldn’t go back to sleep. I was in shock. And when I closed my eyes to try to sleep, a flood of memories came back. Good ones. Funny ones. Because that’s how I remember him – a really good guy, a funny guy who always made me laugh. He once told me that the thing he liked best about me was my facial expressions. I thought the same about him. We could never keep a straight face around each other. We went as friends to prom, and as you can see from the photos above, we only got that one good photo in the center together because in the rest, we were making each other laugh and making those expressions we liked on each other.
Today, I am telling myself to be grateful for each day. None of us knows when we are going to die. Because of cancer, I am able to live more fully in each day, in the present, and I am more grateful and thankful than I used to be, and I wouldn’t change having learned how to do those things in this lifetime for anything. I don’t know how many more days I will get, but I think I will stop worrying about that now. I am just going to be grateful for each day. I am so grateful for Barry’s friendship and for his being part of my tribe. I will miss him. Our tribe will miss him. Rest in peace, my friend.
