I have started reading The Emperor of All Maladies again the last few days. My aunt and uncle sent it to me late last spring–but I was in no state of mind to read it then. I picked it up again this fall, thinking I was ready to take it on. A friend had suggested I really needed to read it if I were going to really pursue NET because I needed to understand more about both the history and the politics of the disease.

I was wrong. The book opens with the story of a woman who is diagnosed with a particularly nasty form of leukemia. The progress of her diagnosis was so close to Jane’s–and I was just coming into the worst part of my first year of grief–that it was too difficult emotionally for me to handle. I set it aside, promising myself I would come back to it after my mind was somewhat more settled.

There will never be a perfect time for me to read the text. There will always be sections of it that will be difficult–that carry too strong an echo of what Jane and I went through. I suspect most cancer patients and lay caregivers will encounter the same difficulties. Perhaps for those in the medical profession the emotional ride will be somewhat easier–but one never knows.

But last week as I prepared for the Relay for Life Kick-Off  dinner, I returned to it thinking it might help me gain the insight I would need to write the things I needed to say that night. Part of the result of that reading are the two poems I posted here the end of last week and used at the dinner–though given the sections I had been reading you would be hard-pressed to see how those things emerged from it.

We all forget, periodically, that we are mortal. We are so caught up in the day-to-day habits of existence that we lose track of the idea we are aging. I will turn 60 in a few months, but most of the time I do not think of that number. In my mind I am still in my 30s physically. My mind is not that of a 30 year old–I have had too much experience for that. But I try to see everything as though for the first time–with that childlike sense of wonder.

Jane had  that same perspective, only more so. That was one of the things that made her sudden illness so hard for her to deal with. She was 55 when her life began to unravel–but she never saw herself as old or infirm. She was still seeking new things and learning new things within days of her death.

We all forget, periodically, that we are alive. Those same things that prevent us from remembering we are mortal often keep us from remembering to live as well. The habits of life are both seductive and addictive.

Jane was so alive in every sense of the word–so unconscious of mortality not because she forgot it was there but because she was so busy being alive to every thing and every person she encountered–that her death was that much harder for us both to bear.

And in her death I, too, for a time, have been dead–in the sense that I have become too wrapped up in grief to truly be alive to the world as I once was. But Friday night I danced again–not particularly well–and I am paying for it these last two days–but I did. And in those steps I began to feel a piece of my old self returning. And in those two poems–in “Here is Life” in particular–I began to come to myself again.

The Emperor of All Maladies is a long book. It is a story that will have difficult moments in it for me because of what I have experienced. But it is only a book. Reading is easy. It is life that is hard. But it is that difficulty that makes it worth living.