Come to Life

Let this be the end of fine. 

I told you I went through something hard.  I saw the fear in your eyes, it was once in my own.  You quickly ask me if I’m okay now. 

I ask us both silently, when was I not okay? Was it when I had cancer? What about when I walked far from the edge of the bridge, lest I be tempted to jump, but still went to work and bought groceries? When I was outside-okay and inside-miserable?  When I was spread so thin, between the rock of my internal pressure to perform and find value in the eyes of others and the hard place of a world reflecting that back to me?  We did not wonder about my okay-ness then.  

What did the not-okay-ness of having cancer mean to you? What did it mean to me?  That I will die? That’s always been true and is still true.  That you will die?  That has always been true and is still true.

What does it mean when I reply that I am okay now? That we can forget it ever happened?  Pretend that my death, or yours, is any less certain?

All the landscapes of my experience, all the seasons inside of it. I don’t live there anymore, but the time I spent there changed me and wanting or needing me to be okay feels like a desire to build condos on a cemetery and pretend like nothing is buried there.  

Things were laid to rest in that cemetery, parts of me.  A breast, a layer of innocence, a dysfunctional relationship with work, habitual self-sacrifice, powering through, chronic overriding of my body’s request to stop, to rest, to be, to feel.  Echoes remain but they’re just echoes. 

Before I had cancer, I survived, nothing more.  Now I live, or at least try to. These past four years have been about coming to life.  

So I will not build condos on that cemetery, no one should live there, including me.  Nor will I build a monument there.  May I let it be a resting place for the past, the remains at peace, undisturbed and left to slowly return to ash. 

May I remember that fine and okay are just words, not promises.

May I honor the dead and remember that I am alive.  May I honor what has been and embrace what is. May I allow that tome of my life to be closed and placed upon a shelf while I turn to the next tome with a beginner’s mind.