Life is fragile. It’s precious because of that, too.
Nobody has died in my life, thankfully, but I’m reminded of that nonetheless today, and it came in many different ways.
A friend of ours—a few of them, actually—was diagnosed with cancer recently. They just had surgery for it. Went well. They’re recovering. But, the tumor was larger than they thought. It had spread to some other surrounding tissues. They will have to do aggressive chemotherapy. So, our friend is going to be sick for a while. They have kids, and they told them.
I took Coco to therapy today, and there was a big dog named Baloo, like the bear in The Jungle Book. He was hit by a car, they think (he’s a rescue), and he’s trying to learn how to walk again. Watching Coco do her own treadmill session and walking for 18 minutes today made me think about just how lucky we are that her own back injury wasn’t more serious.
On the drive over to deliver Stephen a birthday present, Liz and I listened to a podcast about a woman of devout christian faith got colon cancer at 35. She’s survived so far, but she knows it’s tenuous. She’s learning a lot about what it means to be alive when it may not last for much longer, and how interconnected we all are.
And driving home from working on the “project,” this old episode of Radiolab was playing today about a baby who was born so premature, you couldn’t even hold her hand for fear of breaking her insanely fragile skin. Juniper. She almost died a thousand times, but she didn’t. She was two when the episode aired. She’s almost 10 now. Happy and healthy, I think? Last real update was back in 2016 when she was almost 5, happy and healthy. I hope she is.
Today seemed designed to remind me that I won’t always be here. You won’t always be here. So, because of that, being here is special. We need to savor the time we have, relish it, and be grateful for it.
It won’t always be this way.