From the publisher

MEG redux

I didn’t retire after I stopped publishing LareDOS in September of 2014. Life never slowed after that; rather it took on an uncharted, high-pitched, and almost untenable pace as I was diagnosed with cancer just before Christmas.

Instead of enjoying a pause to find the new pace for my life, I began the fight on cancer’s notice to claim this writer’s life.

The last two years have been a frenzied dance of extremes of fear, prayer, lessons learned, and gratitude for those who cared for me in the realms of friendship and medicine.

Many who have dug in for their own fight against the disease know that the most significant communication was often offered not in words, but in acts of kindness. They know, too, that the road to wellness, or at least the abatement of the disease, was a call to rise to save your own life.

The sickness bore a weighted, somber agenda that contrasted with the sterile, brightly lit settings for the needles and instruments of transfusions, IVs, surgery, examinations, a scalpel cut into the chest for a chemo port. Time was meted out by the ticks of a clock that counted the number of days from one chemo treatment to the next, and thereafter the pace of those days determined by what the chemo would unleash that time — a baseball bat to the shins all night, a foggy week of lost memories and lost words, shaky steps on feet gone numb, hands that fumbled at the simple task of buttons on a shirt.

There was a dread to how the days unfolded over a period that seemed endless and surreal, but not ever over the course of the treatments was there an option to give in or to say I’d had enough. So much of a year elapsed in waiting rooms — biding time riddled with doubt and reckoning, time to measure what I was understanding on the learning curve of live or die.

My grandchildren — the three of us in a tight little huddle — fed my tender heart with love and assurances that affirmed how much I wanted to be here, how hard I would fight to remain in their lives another year.

Fear, no longer in my waking thoughts, finds me when I am exhausted, when I am about to keep an appointment for a check-up, or when I learn the disease has taken a friend from me.

Life post-chemo marks a different time, and the measure of myself is an altogether different one.

I don’t call myself a “survivor.” Rather, I understand I was lucky enough to buy some time, time no longer squandered.