Although there are oceans we must cross
And mountains that we must climb
I know every gain must have a loss
So pray that our loss is nothing but time
--The Mills Brothers “Till Then”
Anyone who knows me knows it was only a matter of time before my weekly Wednesday posts started showing up on Thursdays (and this, by the way, is still what I would consider draft form, but I'm about to lose my battery...). Chronically late, I am the quintessential procrastinator, the reporter who never missed a deadline but always made the editor sweat, still writing, tweaking, making changes up until the last possible second.
Everything I read tells me I’m supposed to take it easy, not work too hard, don’t do anything I don’t want to do, but if I didn’t have a self-imposed deadline, I wouldn’t write at all. My original plan was to post on Wednesdays and Sundays, like my favorite New York Times columnist, but I accomplished that exactly zero times. It may not seem like much, but writing twice a week is a tough schedule, especially without the incentive of the Times paycheck.
As you might imagine, I adapted rather well to the no-worries, no-hurries Caribbean lifestyle, where even the newspaper might come out a day late if the beach weather was particularly fine. I thought time had taken on new meaning in the islands, but that was nothing compared to the melted-clock, Dali-esque world I inhabit now, where first the winter and then spring were measured in doctors appointments and chemo treatments. Is it really almost summer?
Although I had to give up my yacht job for the season, I was fortunate enough to keep my part-time gig working on the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Internet 2 Global Concert Series, essentially a closed-circuit, high-definition, telecast transmitting live performances into university theaters around the world. I host the show, and do the backstage interviews during intermission and between pieces.
I can’t say enough about how amazing this experience has been. My co-workers there—who have been with me from the head-spinning days of my January diagnosis through my dog-tired mid-point of chemo treatment just last week when I was napping between meetings and rehearsals—could not be more supportive. I am so honored to work with this outstanding group of smart, dedicated and compassionate people.
And then there is the music.
It is not an overstatement to say that sitting in the concert hall at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts and listening to this most venerable of orchestras play (Beethoven’s majestic Fifth, Bernstein’s beautiful West Side Story, Tchaikovsky’s first symphony, the one he called “a sin of my sweet youth,” Mozart’s exuberant Jupiter) is life-affirming.
I produced a piece for the concert featuring Gustav Mahler’s 8th symphony, known as the Symphony of a Thousand, about how the Philadelphia Orchestra came to give the first U.S. performances of this massive work nearly a century ago. A young Leopold Stokowski—the visionary conductor who would team up with Walt Disney years later to produce Fantasia in 1941—was in the audience for the world premiere in Munich in 1910. The composer himself conducted what Stokowski described as “a flashing insight into infinity.” There’s a great story about Stokowski, a few years later, fleeing Europe amidst wartime tensions, leaving most of his luggage behind, but the score safely stowed in his briefcase.
Perhaps it sounds trite to call musical a universal language, but I’m often at a loss to find words for what I feel while listening. Before January, it could be simply joyful. Now I find it healing.
For a less esoteric but equally life affirming example of the power of music, I take you to a catering hall in the suburbs where, last Saturday night, my godparents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. The highlight came early, when my godfather serenaded his wife with an old Mills Brothers song:
Till then, we’ll dream of what there will be
Till then, we’ll call on each memory
Till then, when I will hold you again
Please wait till then…
A sweet and simple declaration of love, without accompaniment, brought down the house.
We are always looking for proof there is something bigger, a lofty pursuit often glimpsed in brief flashes. In the meantime, we focus on what’s in front of us. My current goal, I suppose, is to keep pushing my weekly posts back another day and another day until there’s nothing left to say about cancer. Till then.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
A Flashing Insight Into Infinity
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
The Big Casino
Most days these days I wake up feeling hungover.
“I don’t get it,” I whined to a friend over the phone on one especially brutal morning. “I ate a healthy dinner, I didn’t drink, I got a good night’s sleep. Why do I feel like shit?”
“Maybe because they’re poisoning your body.”
Oh, right, I keep forgetting. Fucking chemo.
I pop an Advil, put the water on for coffee and turn on the computer so I can complain in cyberspace. Fun Kim has a suggestion:
Maybe you should start strategically placing remnants of a party around the house so when you wake up with the “hangover” you can trick yourself into the party. Maybe not. Just an idea.
Next I check my horoscope. Free Will Astrology is my guilty pleasure:
Alison Covarrubias is a mentor for female entrepreneurs. Her "Ladies Who Launch" program inspires women to be brave and brazen as they develop their own businesses. One of Covarrubias's prime pieces of advice: "If you don't feel like you're going to throw up, you're not taking enough risks." That's also my message for you, Taurus. In the name of smart gambles and tricky success, I dare you to push yourself way out of the comfort zone.
The phrase rattles through my aching head. You’re not taking enough risks.
True enough. I haven’t gambled on much of anything since being diagnosed with, as Junior Soprano dubbed it, “The Big Casino.” I haven’t had to figure out how to make 100 euros last for three weeks, or decide in a split second whether the captain of that gorgeous 1928 Fife about to sail to Valencia is a psychopath or not. Come to think of it, I don’t really make any decisions at all these days. I go to chemotherapy, see my cancerologist, get lots of tests and let all the people who love me worry about what one reporter friend calls “the C word.” Apparently the biggest chance I take is saying the word CANCER out loud. With TV mob bosses and tough journalists so faint-hearted, God only knows who else I’m offending. Cancer is not hard, but as a game it stinks. There’s no calculated risk and the payoff is lousy. Even if you win, the best you can do is break even.
I forward the horoscope to another Taurus friend who recently quit a well-paying job to open her own risky business. She, appropriately, has been puking her guts out. Me, my stomach’s so settled even chemo fails to make me sick.
“Work” consists of fulfilling the obligations I committed to before January and nothing more. I haven’t solicited for new paying jobs, nor have I been working on my book, stuck on a hundred pages in. A few rejections—one from a writer’s conference, one a short story contest—have left my unfinished manuscript shelved, along with a stack of novels I have neither the concentration nor inclination to read.
Scheduling chest X-rays and PET scans, making dates with Dr. R and generally trying to stay as healthy as possible is my new full-time job. Ladies who launch? I’ve become a lady who lunches. If I get up, get dressed up, make it to Center City for a morning meeting and meet a friend for lunch, I’m toast.
Last week my wigs and I spent two exhausting hours at the salon. You can call me vain, but trust me it was a necessity, unless you think it’s acceptable for a relatively young woman to look like an aging bald man with a bad combover. My excellent stylist did the best she could, cutting what’s left of my thinning locks super short. Then she cleaned up Karina’s flyaways and gave the Lindsay Lohan a bang trim.
My hair doesn’t look hip and cool short, it looks like some old-lady beauty-parlor cut, thin and teased, except it’s not some shade of unnatural red or inexplicable blue. In an attempt to draw attention to other assets, I got my toes painted purple, splurging on the Balinese pedicure, inspired by the ancient secrets of the Indonesian salon owner’s grandmother. I breathed in the all-natural floral and ginger scrub and drifted away to the Pacific aboard little Carina which, another e-mail informed me that morning, had safely arrived in the Galapagos. Captain Kid and his girlfriend were probably swimming with sea lions and photographing the prehistoric giant tortoises at that very moment. Then my mind wandered over to another friend sailing in the other direction, across the Atlantic from New York to London. Okay, so he’s on the Queen Mary 2 and not a 30-foot sailboat, but, as he’s never been on a boat before, he is no less adventurous. It makes me happy to know a few people more fully immersed in salt water than me and my toes in the South Philly footbath.
Not all of my adventures are vicarious. I spent my birthday with one of my oldest friends, doing pretty much what we would have done to celebrate our birthdays back in 7th grade, i.e. going shopping at the mall and talking about the boys in our life. My girlfriend is married with two kids and lives in the suburbs, but has cultivated a double life as a rock star groupie, and not a fantasy life, either. Thanks in part to her brother’s status as a bona fide Atlantic City high roller, my friend frequently finds herself in the front row of sold out concerts. The Stones are her favorite so I address her as Mrs. Jagger over bad Chinese in the food court. She refers to me as Mrs. Bono and we buy clothes we think our fake rock star husbands will like.
The day after my birthday, Ellen and I took a road trip to New York to see the sublime Patti LuPone in the Broadway revival of Gypsy. We savored the legendary stage star from the second row of the St. James Theatre, another perfect detail in a day also blessed with perfect traffic and parking karma. After the show, we met up with one of my journalist friends for drinks at the Museum of Modern Art, where the cabernet cost $25 a glass.
“So how are you?” asked the Gotham newsman.
Well, I’ve been sick for three weeks, and I had to get a chest x-ray and I’ve been obsessively taking my temperature every few hours because, despite being an adult, proof is now required when my friends or family ask if I have a fever. My white blood cell counts are low, and I’m tired all the time, and might have to get that $3500 Super Shot that makes your bones hurt again. Meanwhile, I’m really losing my hair now and my excitement about all those fabulous scarves I bought during my last trip to New York lasted about three days. Now I’m over it and I just feel ugly when I look in the mirror.
“Fine, thanks.” I replied.
“Beautiful scarf.”
“Versace.”
Gotham Newsman told us about his efforts to convince his boss to send him to Myanmar, a shift in the conversation that made trendy Manhattan bars and temporary hair loss instantly insignificant, silly even. (It did not, however, detract from the importance of Patti. Good theater remains up there on the list of Things That Really Matter.)
After several more glasses of $25 wine than originally intended, Gotham Newsman picked up the tab and sent us on our way. Ellen, another 40-something single gal, had borrowed her Dad’s car for this trip. Like a little kid pooped after a full day in the big city, I collapsed into the front seat of the Chrysler sedan, whipped off my scarf, and fell asleep listening to Howard Stern on satellite radio grilling Steve Guttenberg about the size of his penis. When I woke up half an hour later, Ellen was speeding down the New Jersey Turnpike and Howard was still talking about Guttenberg’s evidently generous endowment.
I don’t know why this tidbit sticks in my head, maybe because it’s no more off-color than the rest of my current life, but a few days later, I am still laughing about it as I am typing away at three o’clock in the morning. Despite being a chemo day, which makes me really tired, I can’t sleep—which is truly obscene—probably because of the steroids they give you to help the anti-nausea medication work. I am a junkie, so wired from whatever all those drugs are they’re slipping into my cocktails, I might as well drag myself out of the comfortable bed in which I’ve been tossing and turning for the past two hours and head back downstairs to the floor with no clocks for a few more rounds of… whatever it is we’re playing.
Maybe I’ll get lucky. It was, after all, a decent day in the cancerologist’s 13th floor office. My latest PET scan showed no illumination in my neck and chest, indicating the cancer cells have stopped their frenzied dividing dance; inspecting the scan on Dr. R’s computer, I noticed my brain was the only area of glowing hyperactivity, which might also explain tonight’s restlessness. Dr. R was “not ready to jump up and down yet,” but my response to the chemo, he said, has been “phenomenal,” proving, I think, that I am, in fact, the Chemo Queen.
“Woo hoo,” I responded, minus the exclamation point. “I don’t have enough energy to be more excited than that,” I apologized. “This lingering cold has kicked my ass,” I added, neglecting to mention the two days of birthday celebrations.
“Don’t forget the chemotherapy has a cumulative effect,” said Dr. R, “so you probably will feel a little more tired.” Still, Dr. R pronounced the overall picture—you guessed it—good news (!) but I am on to him and the rest of his ilk. Here in the land of relativity, it behooves the patient to know the house rules. Sure the PET shows the chemo is beating the cancer… but are we covering the spread? When can I cut my losses and go home?
Later in the infusion room, I saw a woman who, on my first day of treatment, gave me some helpful advice and a positive assessment of her first round of chemo. Her presence as a veteran was comforting on that day, but today, well into her own treatment for a recurrence of cancer, she was gaunt, pale and, having also suffered a stroke, slurring her speech. She told me she was upbeat because her latest scans also show cancer retreating, but she is a shadow of the woman I met two months ago. I am always uncomfortable talking to her because, having watched her deteriorate before my eyes, I can’t help but wonder what the odds are of ending up like her. The more she wants to talk, the more I need to bolt. I mumbled something lame, got the hell out of there, and went to lunch.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Voice of a Sailor
Since I am still not feeling well (not feverish--98.2 at last check--just not well), I was happy to discover that I don't have to write about me this week because my editor at Sail magazine did it for me. He's not a bad writer, either...
Click Here to Read More...
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Fever
Dr. R, I suspect, is not pleased. Since the day we started chemo, seven weeks ago, he has impressed upon me that I need to call him immediately if I have any signs of fever. Today I let slip that I don’t own a thermometer.
I have a theory that only three groups of people own thermometers:
1. Mothers.
2. Newly married women who are either (a) trying to get pregnant and become mothers or (b) trying not to get pregnant because they’re not ready to be mothers (yes, I know people who employ this method of birth control).
3. Hypochondriac ex-boyfriends who can’t face down a simple cold without whining for their mothers.
I may be a failure at Fahrenheit, but as an ex-reporter, I can take the pulse of the people. I am sure that a simple Single Girlfriend Poll (“Do you own a thermometer?”) will bear out my theory. Flash returns of the SGP (conducted while writing this) indicate mixed results, but when all votes are counted, I am in a clear majority. Even Dr. Lisa doesn’t own a thermometer and she’s a surgeon. Neither does my weather girl friend in New Orleans, which really struck me as funny since, you know, it's her job to know the temperature.
If I am under a pile of blankets, shivering, sweating and alone, I figure it’s time to call the doctor. Anything less than that? Take two Advil and suck it up. (This, by the way, is also why I don’t own a scale. When the jeans start to feel tight, it’s time to start skipping dessert and stop skipping the gym for awhile. I don’t need a flashing red LED display to tell me that.) Besides, with all my moving around, a thermometer is just one more thing to break, and then you have to worry about the mercury spilling (that’s right, and just imagine my surprise at the CVS this afternoon…)
The last time I felt truly feverish, it was more in that Peggy Lee you-give-me-fever-when-you-kiss-me kind of way, no trip to the ER warranted, except maybe for dehydration. I suspect most of my poll respondents also live in the world where fever (Fever! In the morning... Fever all through the night…) is desirable.
In my defense, after my first few rounds of chemo, I stayed with my mother who, naturally, owns a thermometer (see #1 above) and is also exponentially more worried about my health that I am, so no fever was going to escape her unnoticed. Also, I left chemo today, immediately bought a thermometer, and have been compulsively checking my temperature every half hour (97.9 at last check, nowhere near the 100.5 required to call Dr. R at home on his cell phone). Now if I could just get a consensus on normal. Back in the day (of my hard-to-read mercury thermometer) you had to be exact. (98.6? 96.8? I could never remember…) Now you’ve got a digital device that gives you a precise reading to the first decimal, and two pages of instructions on the vast range of “normal.”
Anyway, I am now being punished for my negligence because I am sick (although not feverish.) Not from the chemo, mind you (I am, evidently, the Chemo Queen) but from a nasty cold that started Friday night (“They always start on Friday nights,” observes the wise Dr. R) and now has me in the infusion room red-eyed, miserable, and hacking like I’m the dying diva, about to bring down the curtain on the final act of La Traviata. Today’s chemo date (my mother) is alternating between giving me “my poor baby” looks and trying to pacify the cancer patients in the room (“She’s not contagious. Really. She’s been getting this since she was four. Usually when she’s really tired and run down.”) Hodgkin’s they can handle, but tuberculosis tends to put people on edge.
The good news (!) is that chemo treatment #4 goes on as scheduled AND Dr. R says it’s okay to take the heavy duty anti-cold medication (what’s a few antibiotics and a generous helping of narcotic thrown into the alphabet soup chemo mix?) He prescribes a Z-pack and the biggest bottle of Robitussin with codeine I’ve ever seen. (My second drugstore surprise of the day.) Don’t even ask if I have an appropriately sized teaspoon for measuring the exact dose. If you don’t know the answer to that, you’re not reading closely enough.
The bad news is, I have to work this week, the kind of work where I’m on TV so I’m supposed to look good. On Monday, I guilted my friend Cynthia into sending her own sick child to school so she could schlep me and my stuff into Center City for one of my on-camera interviews. When I complained about how awful I looked, my childhood friend, who never says an unkind word about anybody, conceded, “It’s not your best day…”
It is, however, amazing what fake hair and a good makeup artist can do. A quick check in the mirror, and I am passable for the task at hand. I feel like one of those golf courses in New Jersey, built over a sealed landfill… my exterior is all finely manicured landscape masking a toxic waste dump beneath.
I feel like shit but I finish the interview, and, in another weird twist, the photographer doesn’t blink when I ask if, instead of dropping the DVD off at the office the next day, he can swing by the infusion room so I can screen during chemo.
“You’re going through that, too?” he asks.
Pre-chemo Monday nights have been identified as good drinking nights since I usually feel pretty good, but with the cold/possible TB, I decide it’s best to cancel. I call the girls at the bar.
“Are you finished with the interview? Come join us!” says Single Girl #1.
“I need chicken soup, not alcohol,” I cough into the phone. “Do they have soup over there?”
“They have lobster bisque.”
A few minutes later, steaming crock in front of me, I am still in the game, regaling my girlfriends with my latest discovery from Cancerland:
“Did you know there’s an online dating service for cancer patients?” I announce, in the just-try-to-trump-this-one approach I’ve adopted since being diagnosed.
There is a moment of silence.
“You mean there’s an entire, untapped pool out there?” says Single Girl #2, incredulously.
“Apparently.”
“So, are you going to do it?” asks SG #1.
“She doesn’t like to associate with those people,” SG #2 reminds SG #1. “I’ll bet all the men are sensitive and caring, though.”
“Maybe you should do it,” offers SG #1, suggesting that SG #2 go online and apply with my information.
We consider this. Given that I have no desire to participate, we rationalize, in a two-martinis-in kind of way, that this might just be acceptable.
Then again, we could all be suffering from delirium, which, while sometimes brought on by severe cases of fever, can also be caused by (according to my Webster's) "intoxication and other disorders."
Now you’ve listened to my story
Here’s the point that I have made:
Chicks were born to give you fever,
Be it Fahrenheit or Centigrade.
They give you fever
When you kiss them
Fever if you live and learn
Fever! ‘till you sizzle
What a lovely way to burn…
What a lovely way to burn…
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
The Ghost in the Room
He does not believe in the supernatural but knows I do and so he, somewhat haltingly, told me the story, perhaps not quite believing all the details himself, of how one day, there I was in his house out there on the prairie. “A presence” is how he described it. I wasn’t an apparition, and I didn’t speak, I was simply, on more than one occasion, there.
When, a month later, he got a new job, moved to another state, and I started showing up in his living room there as well, he figured it was time to do just that. Our volatile relationship didn’t survive its torrid highs and destructive lows, but there was no denying we had some kind of cosmic connection from the moment we met, almost 15 years ago. Since this was also the day we both met Beyoncé (all three of us started working at the same television station on the same day), it was, metaphysically speaking, inevitable that the call would come the very day Beyoncé and I were together in New York, shopping for wigs and savoring our first face-to face gossip lunch in years.
“God has a funny sense of humor,” said Beyoncé.
My atheist ex, however, doesn’t get the joke, which is how we ended up this past Sunday night, a few weeks after our initial contact, having a conversation that started like this:
Me: How come you haven’t said anything about my blog?
Atheist Lover: I haven’t been able to read all of it.
Me: So you don’t like my writing.
Atheist Lover: I’m not even going to respond to that.
Me: What then?
Atheist Lover: It’s the subject matter. It’s difficult.
Me: So you don’t think it’s any good.
Atheist Lover: That’s not what I said.
Those are not direct quotes but you get the idea, not only about the dialogue, but also about why things didn’t work out between us. Well, that and something about me being fickle and noncommittal, but that’s another story.
Being a tough-edged newsman who recently lost his best friend to breast cancer, he got straight to the point, no softball warm-ups: What if? What if you’re not in the 80% who make it? Do you really think this is routine? Are you scared? Leave it to somebody whose last words to you were “please don’t call me again” to resurface out of the blue and bring up the tough stuff. Do people besides reporters do this?
After my January “this is not a death sentence” diagnosis/prognosis and the handing over of a pamphlet on how to execute a living will, death left the room for awhile.
I had to laugh so I wouldn’t lose it. I get that making fun of this is not for everyone. It’s not meant to be. I started writing because it was cathartic. It still is. I like that people read me and thrive on feedback. I am flattered when someone says they think what I write might help somebody else, but make no mistake: This is not altruistic. This is my therapy.
Atheist Lover, for one, is not buying my hilarious cancer crap. This is somewhat puzzling because he is a funny guy. I also believe I inherited irreverence from him and attribute much of my no-holds-barred ability to talk about damn near anything—in public—to the years we worked together. I don’t know if everyone would consider those traits valuable parting gifts from a love affair, but I do. (To be fair, I also walked away with a fine appreciation for art collecting, a really good recipe for swordfish and vivid, steamy memories of long weekends where we never left the bedroom, but that’s definitely another story…) It’s okay, though, that we don't see eye to eye on this. The Universe knows when you need to be challenged.
“It’s really not necessary to sound so chipper all the time,” wrote another skeptic in an e-mail.
I have had my meltdowns, yes—but not since I started chemotherapy. I am conserving energy by not dealing with anything I don’t absolutely have to deal with right now this minute. The other day, another 40-something single girlfriend asked if I harvested my eggs before beginning. (I did not.) Her tentative question made me realize I had completely stopped talking about an issue that consumed me in the early weeks of this whole mess. I did what I had to do—cried, researched, weighed my options, cried some more, and made the most thorough and thoughtful decision I was capable of in the brief time allotted to consider my future fertility without perilously delaying life-saving treatment—and locked the ramifications away in a box to be opened…later, after this is all over, preferably in a nice exotic locale where the fate of not having children might be equated with freedom instead of loss.
This is not denial; it is a practical approach that works for me. It lets me live my life as normally as possible while my doppelganger—the one with cancer—goes to chemo biweekly and spends her free time flirting with the other side, making spectral house calls to unwitting ex-boyfriends.
Am I going to die? Yes. But most likely not from this. The fact that cancer could potentially kill me is, for now, stowed away in the box with the baby. If I go through six months of chemo and radiation and the tests show it didn’t work, then it’ll be time to think about it. Either way, I’m pretty sure I’ll be glad I didn’t spend the next/last six months of my life obsessing about dying.
Am I scared? I am probably about as scared of death as your average person, which is to say even though I believe there is some kind of afterlife, and sometimes can consider this peacefully and in a semi-enlightened way, I am often utterly gripped by fear. The fear is manageable when death is back there in its place, lurking in the shadows with the rest of the ghosts, but sometimes it insists on getting all up in your face, like it did on Sunday, and not just long-distance at the end of the day, but at the start of the day as well, at brunch with Ellen.
Ellen’s dad has been gravely ill, in and out of the hospital, for months now. Our conversations always start with an update on how he’s doing. On Sunday morning, however, Ellen’s sad news was that another friend’s father, believed to be in perfect health, had died suddenly, apparently suffering a heart attack while snorkeling in Martinique.
I told Ellen about one of the cancer books I’m reading in which the author describes a workshop on dying she attended at a Buddhist retreat. The first exercise goes something like this: What is the best-case scenario for your death? (Ellen and I looked at each other over our Bloody Marys and mimosas. Our grieving friend couldn’t be ready to hear this, but passing in a blissful, underwater heaven in some idyllic tropical setting with your spouse at your side had to be the right answer.) What is the worst-case scenario? What do you have to do to make the best-case scenario happen?
Maybe the dying exercise is macabre. But the point, I think, is that in the end, the questions about how you die become a lesson in how to live which, barring suicide, is the only part we have any control over anyway.
Exactly one year ago, I was in Antigua, racing in a classic boat regatta with my friend, Captain Kid. He had been debating whether to keep sailing on toward the Pacific or do the practical thing and head home to Cape Cod, get a real job and sock away some money. At a rum party one night, he announced he had decided to sail the Pacific.
“If I only had a year to live, that’s what I would do,” I remember him telling me. “That seems like a good enough reason to do it now.”
Two days ago, he and his girlfriend took their 30-foot sailboat through the Panama Canal. Next stop: the Marquesas, smack in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Not too long ago, I was on a plane with my St. John friend Fun Kim. We had just spent two weeks in Venice. Prior to that, I had made my first trans-Atlantic crossing, sailed around the Mediterranean with a crew from Malta and traveled solo through central Italy. Fun Kim had been sailing the Aegean and cavorting around Istanbul. Before all that, we were both living and working in the Virgin Islands. We were on our way to Palma de Mallorca to look for yachting jobs.
Security was especially tight as there had been another terrorist bombing scare in London the day before. We decided to fly anyway and, while sitting there waiting for take-off, agreed that if the plane went down, well, we couldn't complain too much about how things turned out. We had done more in the previous few years than many people do in a lifetime. And we had both called our mothers to tell them we loved them.
That doesn’t mean I want to die, and I know Fun Kim doesn’t want to either (even on the days when working full time and getting her masters back home in Oregon is so bo-ring). That plane conversation happened in 2006, a full year before the summer in Spain when we saw the running of the bulls in Pamplona, sailed to the America’s Cup, and discovered the vending machine on a dock in Valencia that dispenses that coldest Heinekens on the planet for only one euro. Clearly there is more life to be lived.
I do, however, like to think I contemplated What If? three years ago when I first quit my city job and moved to paradise in search of…more. There were many good reasons the timing was right to make the move--I was healthy, my parents were healthy, I had money in the bank and no major responsibilities--but the final motivator, the real kick in the ass was…What if? What if a year (or three) from now, something happens and I’m no longer in a position to do it?
I thank God every day I did not fail to seize the moment. Having that regret in this moment would truly be haunting.
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