Paint my mood blue
Seemingly out of context and without warning, it hits me. Hard. Like a punch to the chest, it takes my breath away.
I have terminal lung cancer.
Tuesday afternoon I crawled into bed with the heating pad and had myself a good long cry. Eventually David wandered in and joined me under the covers. We just lay there for a bit. Feeling blue.
And then, because we have a fifteen year old for whom we are doing our best to maintain a veneer of normalcy, we pulled it together. David started dinner and I blew my nose and washed my face.
Peter was working on homework at the dining room table and I sat down across from him. Picking up the science section of the New York Times, I starting reading an article by Natalier Angier, True Blue Stands Out In An Earthy Crowd. Here was a totally different take on blue. Blue in all its wonder. Filled with awe inspiring paragraphs such as this one: “In place of blue pigment, vertebrates and others turn to figment. As Dr. Prum and others have determined lately, many of nature’s most spectacular blues — the plumage of a blue jay or indigo bunting, the teal of a skink lizard’s tail, and now the lesula monkey’s blue scrotum and Pollia’s shimmering blue fruit — are structural in nature. They arise from the specific shape and arrangement of their underlying components.”
So there you go. It’s tough going sometimes, but it’s all about perspective. An hour earlier, my heart had been breaking. And now it was bursting with joy.
life and breath: outliving lung cancer 