One Year Ago Today
A year ago today, I stood outside Perlmutter Cancer Center at NYU Langone Health and cried in the arms of my friend, Meg, as I said, “I don’t want to have breast cancer.” She held my hand as I was diagnosed moments later. After that appointment on that impossibly sunny and warm morning, she saw this poster on her way home that said, “Cancer won’t be my last dance” and sent it to me.
I hung onto that phrase for many months after.
I wish I could go back and give that Christa a hug. I would tell her the year ahead would be filled with terror and fear and that not a single day of the journey would be easy.
It would also be a year filled with love and joy and friends who showed up again and again and again, who never let her down. I would tell her that her heart and spirit would be shattered repeatedly but grow back bigger and stronger and that her life force would see her through.
She would look death in the eye multiple times and she wouldn’t flinch. “Not today, Death” would become a powerful refrain. I would tell her life would never be the same, but she would make it even better. She would heal.
And finally, I would hold out my hand to her as she made that last step on that very difficult climb. I would put my arm around her at the top of our mountain where we stand today looking out over the last far-too-eventful year and say, “Look at the view, my love. You did this. With love and help from many, and science and faith and modern medicine, you got to the other side and clawed your way back into the light. Those dark days are a gift. From here, we can be grateful for them. They are a part of us now, and always will be. Let’s go make them mean something. We’ve got more work to do, more joy to find, and more dreams to fulfill. We go together. Always. And we lift others as we rise.”