My sister, a caner survivor, once told me that a cancer diagnosis was a great leveler. This was years before my own cancer experience, and, sure, I had an intellectual understanding of this. Lymphoma schooled me in many ways, among these that I live in my body. Such a simple, profound thing. I had never lived in a body that couldn’t walk up the stairs in my own house, not just because of a sprained ankle or a new baby in arms, but because of weakness in my bones and flesh. I had never considered that I might never be able to enter the bedroom whose walls I painted, where I have slept for so many years.

These days, after a summer devoted to learning how to eat and sleep again and to walk those stairs, outside as much as possible in this gloriously sunny, perishingly dry Vermont summer, I no longer embody the near-translucence of cancer-and-chemo patient. Such pleasure I have when people ask why I’ve cut my hair, and I can reply that I didn’t snip, I lost. The hair I’ve lost is now returning in a metaphor that I can’t ignore: softer but with my childhood cowlick.

Disease hasn’t magically transformed me; if anything, my thorns have proliferated. But here’s a thing: the world where I live is descending into spectacular autumn. Sure, some years the fall foliage bursts brighter than other years, but always, always, heartstopping in beauty. Autumn’s a reminder of my mortality, your mortality, the dearness of this fleeting world. A reminder to pause in our gardens, on our house steps, the sidewalk, whatever trail we may be following. Take a moment. Breathe in, out, in….

From Stephen Jay Gould’s essay “The Median Isn’t the Message”:

Of course I agree with the preacher of Ecclesiastes that there is a time to love and a time to die—and when my skein runs out I hope to face the end calmly and in my own way. For most situations, however, I prefer the more martial view that death is the ultimate enemy—and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light.