I read something in my FB feed this morning that told me a girl I went to high school with died. She had breast cancer and was a year older than me; a year younger than my sister. It's not the first time someone has posted that a classmate or an almost classmate had moved on but I had time so I pulled out the year book and I looked her up.
I vaguely remember the face. Frozen on the page of my yearbook. Forever 16 or 17 like all of us. If she said 10 words to me during our 3 years of overlap in that school I would count it as a lot. Having no memories of her one way or another tells me she at least wasn't a mean person. Well, not to me but I'm a pretty decent litmus test for these things, I got my share of shit from classmates.
In any case, I remember the face but we were nothing more than strangers to each other.
I feel sad about her passing though. I googled her name and found some articles that explained more in depth what happened. 2006 diagnosed for the first time (31 years old). Chemo and breast removal sent it into remission. 2009 it came back but had metastasized to her liver. Fighting for 4+ more years until it got her. That's what I learned. She had 2 boys (9 and 12) and a husband and from pictures lived in a nice subdivision in town. A place I know well from hanging out there as a kid.
Two things really hit me. One, her boys were 1 and 4 when she first found out she was sick. I can't imagine that, having a little man of my own. How would I tell him mommy is sick? How would I face the idea of bringing him up to be a good man without the one person he loves above all others? How did her husband do it? Two, she fought.
Her FB page was mostly open and there are hundreds of pictures on there. About 3/4 of them are of her boys doing boy things like playing baseball and fishing but there are some too of her. While she was in chemo, no hair, no eyebrows, hollowed out but still smiling.
That's what got me. She's doing chemo, she's fighting this thing and she's going to baseball and football games with her family. She's going fishing. She's wearing her team's jersey and rooting them on. She's going on vacation with her husband. She's living and fighting because she now knows what so few of us do. That you're never more alive until that moment when you almost weren't.
Like I said, I didn't know Jennifer personally. I probably wouldn't have recognized her if we'd passed in the grocery store. But I felt myself grieving for her and her family just the same. I hugged my wife and son a little tighter this morning. I gave them extra kisses and made sure to tell them I loved them because it's important that they know I do. It's important that I recognize just how lucky I am to still be drawing breath, and to have those I love draw breath, this morning because so many other good and decent people are not.
Life is pain Highness. So said Wesley in the Princess Bride and the older I get the more I realize how right he was. Human suffering is everywhere if we pay attention and maybe it's right and good that we should sometimes. Because we are in fact never more in the moment, never more appreciative of what we have, never more alive than we are in the moments immediately following the moment that we almost weren't. It doesn't take a near death experience to get that, just attention to the death that has been there all along.
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