Your Lesson To Me

Everyone talks about what cancer taught them. About how it taught them to appreciate each moment. To live without fear. To love. To not put things off. All of this is so beautiful. And everyone who learns these lessons is blessed. But I feel like my lesson--watching my friend die--is the opposite. I already live for the moment. I have a carpe diem personality in excess. I live for the moment, to an extreme. I ALWAYS put off doing the dishes, paying the bills, and making the bed, to do the fun thing in the moment--much to the joy, and often annoyance, to adults in my life. Like my husband. My crazy, almost delirious urge to enjoy the moment comes from a life of constantly moving, the life of a Navy brat. As a child I never knew when my father was going to come home and say, "Guess what, tomorrow we are moving to X!!! Isn't that exciting?" It was. But there was no option. Each time I would leave my friends, my teachers, my school, and all the places I loved. I never knew if I would ever return. It was just over. I never knew if ANYTHING i did, ever, would be for the last time. I am an adult, now, so I have a little more control. But it has been hard to realize that. So I guess I live with the determination to appreciate that is often born in the terminally ill for the first time. I appreciate!
What I have a harder time with is things that last for a long time. My mental time horizon lasts about three months. Being pregnant was a mind-blowing experience for me. I could not imagine ANY endeavor that would last 10 months. Let alone 18 years. I always felt I would die young. I thought I would be dead by 30. I liked the biographies of young geniuses who flashed through the world like comets--ablaze and beautiful, lighting up the sky--and then were gone. I wanted to be like that. I have had trouble coming up with longer term goals. My husband has tried. As has my therapist. She said I have trouble with gardens because I do not believe, deep in my soul, that I will even be around long enough for the plants to grow. So why bother?
But as I lay with Natalia, who knew she had six weeks to live (which turned out to be three days) I thought about what I really want to do. I thought, of course, about what I would really want and wish for if I were told I had six weeks. It's never what you think it would be. It is not the big things, the trips, the grandiose gestures. It is the smallest, sweetest things. But more than anything, I felt myself switch from short term to long. I realized, as I lay there with her, that I CANNOT die now. I absolutely CANNOT die before my boys are 18. I must fight, I must be here for them, I must devote myself to them for the long haul. I cannot indulge in half-formed romantic notions of dying young (not that I am so young any more...) I must be here. I must take care of myself. I must take care of them. I brought them into this world and I must show them how to love, and swim, and surf, and travel, and make the world a better place.
I must do more than live for the day. I must live for a lifetime.