Gratitude

Over the long Labor Day weekend I felt my anxiety ramping up. The following Tuesday morning I was scheduled to drink thirty-two ounces of water and otherwise fast in preparation for my one-year post-treatment PET scan. While I have no symptoms suggesting a recurrence of cancer and have been routinely scoped by my surgeon over the past twelve months, I could not help but wonder if microscopic cells somewhere inside me were nonetheless plotting my demise. 

This is my third bout with cancer. The first two instances were so routine as to be unremarkable: a LEEP procedure after a concerning PAP smear in 1999 and a stage 1 patch of squamous cell skin cancer on my clavicle treated with topical chemo in 2023. In 2024 “real” cancer struck … HPV 16 squamous cell oral cancer that resulted in an eight-hour surgery, five weeks of radiation and ten months of occupational therapy. 

Each of these three times I reacted to the news that I had cancer differently. At fifty, I remember feeling sanguine that my daughters were successfully launching, if not yet fully adulting. I was surprisingly calm about my outpatient surgery and correspondingly relieved that the pathology report indicated no further treatment necessary. At seventy-four, I saw my skin cancer episode as age appropriate, a nuisance, but nothing to be particularly worried about. Six months later my oral cancer diagnosis was a different story, for this was the cancer that had killed my husband, torturing him (and me, too) over a period of a year and a half in its end stages. 

My reaction: I did not want to die. But more than that, I did not want to suffer as he had. I made that very clear to my medical team. I would refuse treatments that only prolonged the inevitable, that stole my dignity and my independence. I would go on my own terms. I knew this disease— perhaps better than they did— having lived side by side with it for three years. I had watched its toll month by month, then week by week, then day by day, then, finally, minute by minute as Dan’s life force left his body. 

“No thank you,” I said to seven weeks of chemotherapy and radiation. “I’d rather go out after a delicious meal, a perfect wine pairing, and a fatal injection.” 

Obviously, I’m still here, so that eventuality has not (yet) become a reality. My treatment plan was in large part shaped by my in-depth understanding of this disease, my insistence that I would not go the way my husband had, and my surgeon’s forceful persuasion of his colleagues at the tumor board to let him try to obviate the need for chemo and the full seven weeks of radiation. I believed him when he said he thought he could spare me the side effects that had ultimately killed Dan’s quality of life without definitively killing the cancer. So far, so good.

Since Dan’s death, but especially since my own brush with mortality, I have thought a great deal about what this life, my life is really all about. At its most basic, I have fulfilled my biological destiny by passing on my genes. In more abstract ways I’ve tried to be more of a giver than a taker. I like to think that my thirty-year teaching career contributed to the betterment of society, one student at a time. I’ve consciously aspired to be a steward of human potential, of the natural world, of the legacy of generations of my and others’ forebears. On a personal level I’ve loved and been loved by six men since my teen years. Two of those men are now dead, three are happily married to other women, and one, the father of my children, can still be counted as among my best friends. I have been an imperfect, flawed partner, but I have always tried to give and in turn have received the gift of unconditional love. Now, as a widow, I am nobody’s first priority, and that is how it should be. My daughters have strong marriages and growing children to put first.

I now see my task in whatever time remains to me in the simplest of terms: live in the moment and be grateful. Walking my dog in Riverside Park under a canopy of sycamore leaves, clouds scudding in blue skies over the Hudson, I am just happy to be alive. Eating homemade strawberry shortcake and feeling my mouth water after months of distorted taste and dry mouth feels like heaven. Playing a board game with my grandson (and losing), pushes any concerns I have about the day’s news aside; being with him, loving him, is all that matters. Reading a good book, learning new things, watching a compelling show, heck, even streaming a low brow television series…these are activities to savor. Pleasure— unmitigated as it now is by the pressure to produce something, to be worthy of self-fulfillment through service to others— has never felt so good. I am alive, present, using my senses to appreciate the world around me, knowing that at some point my sight will fail, touch will bring pain, the coos of the pigeons on the windowsill will be replaced by the beeping of monitors. 

I still worry about what the future will bring, mostly on account of my children and grandchildren. I am easily brought to tears when confronted with the inhumanity of bombing refugees scrambling for food, of masked thugs masquerading as law enforcement throwing Latinos to the ground. In a way my emotional radar is more highly attuned than ever. This is the flip side of being more alive, more sentient, more in the moment. But I wouldn’t trade it for the compartmentalization that was part and parcel of my working life, my parenting days, when “busyness” was the norm. 

After Dan died it bothered me tremendously to think of all of the knowledge he had acquired evaporating. I wanted it to endure somehow, to be appreciated as the work of a lifetime. His art fills my apartment, slides and journals are packed away, but what was inside his head, his soul, is gone. I’ve come to terms with its transient nature. My writing, like his sculpture and drawings, will persist, maybe in bankers’ boxes in my daughters’ basements. That’s okay. I’ve come to appreciate and be grateful for the act of creating rather than the product. 

I have always believed in and tried to live by the physician’s motto “do no harm.” I was once asked what I would want someone to say about me after I was gone. My answer: “She was decent.” In the end, that is enough. In the meantime, I am cultivating joy, practicing gratitude. 

POSTSCRIPT:  My PET scan was clear. Another reprieve!

Isle of Eigg, Scotland, June 2025