This afternoon, a baby bear rambled past my window. That’s just about the most exciting thing to happen to me today.
Oh, and I wasn’t diagnosed with cancer for the 10th June 6th in a row.
That’s pretty remarkable and yet not exactly a “cancerversary.” That comes in November when, if all goes well, I’ll be considered 10 years clear of cancer.
Still, June 6th–which is, by the way the anniversary of D-Day–always makes me stop and think about what I was doing on that morning in 2007. I had a needle biopsy of the softball-sized tumor in my chest, and then the oncologist at my local hospital gave me the bad news — it’s lymphoma, probably Hodgkin’s.
Nurses and doctors would spend the next two days assuring me that’s the “good cancer,” because it’s highly curable. But it was, in fact, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, the, um, “bad cancer,” because the odds for a cure aren’t as high. And yet, I’m still here 10 years later.
I’ve spent June 6ths since then doing more interesting things than I’ve done today. One year, I took the kids for a weekend holiday on the boardwalk in Asbury Park, New Jersey, where we ate Cuban food and surfed the waves, though not in that order, of course. I bought a hat, and we played pinball. One year, I watched the Enterprise space shuttle being ferried up the Hudson River to its new home at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum. Once, I attended a neighborhood barbecue where a large bear showed up, but we shooed it away by making a lot of noise.
While those were surely extraordinary June 6ths, I take solace in the fact that I can still have ordinary ones, because those are the days I missed the most when I was hooked up to a chemo drip. I missed doing the everyday stuff that we take for granted. The stuff we might not bother to journal or tell our families about at the dinner table. So today, I was extraordinarily happy for the ordinary things I did.
Today, I …
…made a sandwich for my 20-year-old, who was running late for his summer job.
…went to the gym.
…made a dentist appointment.
…wrote and edited a few assignments, and accepted a couple of meeting invitations.
…filled out a mortgage application.
…talked to a friend on the phone.
And I saw a baby bear ramble past my window. Okay, that was a little bit extraordinary, even for summertime in my neighborhood. But it’s a good reminder that if we are handed the privilege of living, the ordinary will be punctuated by the extraordinary. Yet all of it is a beautiful luxury, from the mortgage application to the dentist appointment to handing a sandwich to my college kid, who almost grew up without a mother.
It’s not that I treasure each day for the gift that it is, stopping to smell every flower and Instagramming each smile. Rather, I spend June 6th grateful for the treasures that I don’t notice much of the rest of the year, because they have once again become commonplace.
I go to the gym.
I talk to friends on the phone.
I fill out paperwork.
I make sandwiches.
I work.
It’s all so ordinary, and yet, so extraordinary on this, the 10th June 6th in a row that I have not been diagnosed with cancer–a day to be treasured and journaled and shared with my family at dinnertime. It’s ordinary, and yet, extraordinary, because today, I saw a baby bear ramble past my window.
“But it’s a good reminder that if we are handed the privilege of living, the ordinary will be punctuated by the extraordinary.” Love that. Thank you.
love. love. love.
kisses. glad you’re here.
wish i saw the bear.