A few days of streaming sunlight. I wander around outside, over the crusty remains of snow, the thawing grass. The garden yet lies covered. A junco picks at seed scattered beneath the feeder. This far along in the chemo, staring at the end, I’m hard used up, muscles withered, fat trimmed near to my bones. But here, here, alive.

My life – physically, mentally, economically, spiritually – has been crumpled up by disease. Now, ahead, lies the unfolding, the remapping. A friend visiting with her three-year-old, with daffodils and chocolate, points out what I’ve recently reckoned with: that my fierce independence, my raving insistence to live my life, on my own terms and never shaped to the pattern of any man (as Tillie Olsen wrote), has long been my lifeline, the way through lean times, betrayal, uncertainty. But cancer, that mighty devil, flipped that in my face and revealed it as my hollow weakness, too.

Day by day here, determined to remain free from the hospital, to finish to the final drop this course of so-called treatment, glean back what I can salvage. Four months ago, I didn’t think I would live to see this season’s Chionodoxa blue flowers. This afternoon, my daughter and I remarked that the walnut tree I planted seven years ago as a mere twig has plump buds on its lengthy branches. Buds, blossoms, leaves. Beyond words.

“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.” ~ Rilke