No Bad News

“Don't nobody bring me no bad news.....”

The Wiz

We've known each other for better than 65 years. She is my oldest friend and impossibly dear to me. She writes that she's been diagnosed with a genetic mutation that predisposes her to certain cancers. I read her email slowly and carefully, three times in all, and then once more. The spectre of yet another precious friend with cancer turns my emotions into a kaleidoscope and I see all manner of jagged edge'd chaotic colors and shapes. They push and shove and grate against each other violently and I'm paralyzed with not knowing what to write back.

Later that same day, I visit with another dear friend just diagnosed with stage three throat cancer and facing a long, uncertain road of radiation and chemotherapy. We sit by her open bedroom window and talk while a warm breeze stirs the curtains and her beloved dog sits in her lap, looking at her with absolute devotion. The daffodils she planted in the front yard wave and bend gently in the promise of spring wind. I see the kaleidoscope still but it's less raucous and the colors are more pastel. Even so, I can't make sense of any of it.

It's all part of God's plan, my well-intentioned and more religious-minded friends like to tell me.

We're not supposed to understand it, they say with a confident, chin up smile. Be that as it may. It doesn't save lives or bring back the ones I've loved and lost. If there is a God (and agnostic or not, I do want desperately to believe) I can't see that He's paying much attention to this little world. Maybe, so often as I am tempted to do, He's had enough and has just given up. We have, it seems to me, made our own beds. Perhaps He thinks we should lie in them awhile.

And yet, as the poets say, hope springs eternal. How or why is often beyond me, but it does.

And I'm grateful if suspicious.

Another spring is right around the corner.

“The truth is that we know so little about life, we don't know what the good news is and what the bad news is.”  Kurt Vonnegut