lavish gifts

i have been reading and researching. not blogging, not returning e-mails.

i am taking lessons about living (and dying) from two amazing young women who have walked this path before me.

kristi and karen inspire me with their intelligence, strength, and honesty. they say things i feel, but cannot express adequately.

the following are just a few examples:

I think chemo/cancer is like growing old on speed. Age takes away and so does chemo/cancer. Dreams, activities, joys, passions: all curtailed. This disease takes too much. Most days it's not a matter of how good I feel, but how not bad.

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I don't want to be seen. I've felt so ugly recently. Battered by chemotherapy. I look into my mirror every day and see a sick person gazing back. I've stopped looking people in the eyes when I go out in public, because I always see what I look like now reflected back in their expressions. Sick. Strange.

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My body feels strange to me, swollen. All the weight I'd lost so industriously is back. And if I continue to do chemo into infinity--probably more will come. I feel helpless against it. I hate this feeling, this lack of control. Defeat. I may live longer, but I will be chubby and eyebrowless and eyelashless and a freakish looking thing. I will feel tired every day and weak and low. Yes, I will be here a while longer--but much diminished.

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Lethargy tugs at my soul. I encounter people and say all manner of inappropriate and awkward things because my mind, my mood, my being is a puzzle put together all wrong. I don't fit. Nothing is seamless, It's all jarring and disjointed bits of hard, unyielding paper colliding willfuly into one another.

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Kristi Michelle Buss
5/16/76-9/1/05

One of Kristi's favorite quotes:

Soon you will read in the newspaper that I am dead.
Don’t believe it for a moment.
I will be more alive than ever before.

D.L. Moody

Choosing to stop treatment is NOT the equivalent of suicide, nor is it "giving up" in any way. It's about making a decision to have the best quality, not quantity, of life possible. You're not ready for me to die and you think it's selfish of me to stop my treatment? Well, then consider what you're asking ME to do: you are asking ME to suffer physically for YOU simply because YOU don't want to try and alter the simplistic mentality that you cling to when it comes to defining things like life and death.

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The problem is, though, is that cancer DOES take everything eventually...at least on a material level. The only solution to it all is to learn to LET it take everything, to detach from all of the material things that the disease destroys so that when the loss happens, you understand that it's not a "real" loss, that the disease has only taken things from you that are of an illusory nature. My health, my body, my brain...all illusions. And while I know all of this cognitively, I still find myself feeling the pain of the loss.

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All of this beauty in the world, all of the promise that this days holds...and I have the privilege of viewing it with decaying eyes. Irony is so very fascinating sometimes.

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Another day. I get so tired of living this way sometimes. So, so very tired of it. Every day is a battle with pain. Every day is a battle with breathing. And every day is a battle trying to make other people understand this.

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Karen Anne Heinzeroth

9/25/73 - 6/11/06

it is reassuring to know that someone else felt the way i am feeling.

but don't worry, it's not all doom and gloom around here...these girls were funny too. they are also making me laugh and smile.

kristi said this: "That is how we face the darkness, isn't it? With laughter. Say you're in that airplane that takes a nosedive--rather than screaming or crying--if you can pull out any shred of humor to cling to--go down laughing."

i'll leave you with one of karen's favorite quotes:

we are blessed instead when others can handle our truth