Lost Time, Updates on the Rollercoaster Ride, and Emily Dickinson

Time has done some weird stuff lately. In between rushed medical tests, phone consults and e-mail consults with doctors, I’ve been losing hours – not reading, writing, responding to e-mails, but just – lost. I’ll chalk this up to stress, this misspent time. I’ve appreciated all those who have left notes, visited with me, written e-mails and called, those who sent flowers and cheerful messages in my last two stressful weeks. I remember that I am lucky to have quite a community, not only in person but online. You guys really do make a difference, so thank you.

I apologize for not giving updates and answers. Besides a nasty case of stomach flu I caught in between doctor appointments, after various multi-doctor get-togethers, they’ve decided to run some more tests, so I’m going in for some blood work first thing Monday morning, and then maybe a radioactive trace test to see if the liver growths might be some kind of benign solid growth …which may be good news or bad news or just medium or tedious. I am hoping for good to medium-tedious news, an outcome that won’t result in anything scary (or any more tests.) Still hoping to dodge the bullet of possible cancer or even dodge the liver biopsy, if it is possible.

During this time, several of my family members and close friends are facing their own serious health crises with various levels of grace, terror, sadness, anger, frustration. It is more terrifying watching loved ones struggle than it is to struggle yourself, as I realized a few months ago watching Glenn in the hospital. I always wish there was more I could do.

You can’t always protect yourself from danger, or bad news. We can’t ignore pain, or illness, or losing people we love. We are vulnerable and mortal. I read a lot of Emily Dickinson this week, and I realized – I don’t think she was very scared of death. “Because I could not stop for death” is almost a cheerful poem, while “I heard a fly buzz – when I died” imagines, in a sort of disembodied way, the tiny mundane fly on the other side of her own dying moments. I mean, she’s pretty gangster – she has the opposite of fear, she has curiosity. Definitely a therapeutic read during a stressful time.

Here’s a little XKCD comic for a lighter-hearted look at her poem:

We just lost two courageous and terrific writers, Harper Lee and Umberto Eco. It’s a good time to re-read Six Walks in Fictional Woods, or Foucault’s Pendulum, perhaps. “To survive, we must tell stories,” said Eco. It made me think: What kind of stories are we telling – ourselves, others, in our work? What stories will we leave behind?