Dear Folks,
This is going to be a long, sad letter. It’s going to be hard on you if, like me, you think of life as a fairy tale, where good things happen to good people — or where bad things come out all right in the end and teach good lessons. One shouldn’t write sad letters at the holiday season, but this has been a sad month for me, and this letter seems to demand of me the most honest sharing I am capable of. I’m not in anything like the exalted mood of my last letter. I’ve been in some dark depths. The good news is that I’ve come back up a long way.
That was a long pause there as I considered how the heck to tell this. I guess chronologically is the best way, although it intermixes the trivial with the profound — which is, however, the way it happened, the way life does happen.
When I last wrote I had just been diagnosed with endometrial cancer, and that’s all I knew. Over the next week I learned a lot more. They brought me in for magnetic resonance imagery, to see better what was going on. There was a wierd justice in that — I did my Ph.D. thesis on nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. In those ancient days we were at the leading edge of the field by putting whole enzyme molecules in the machine. Now they put in whole people.
The MRI machine is an impressive thing, about as big as a living room, with a tube in the middle, about one inch bigger around than me in all dimensions, into which they slid me. In my day we slipped a plastic flange over the sample tube and blew air against it to spin the sample rapidly in the magnetic field, to average out any field unevenness. I was imagining their putting a spinner hat on me and whirling me around, and I had to suppress giggles as they pushed me in.
When you’re inside you hear strange clanking noises and every now and then they tell you they’re going to do a 12 minute scan or a 20 minute scan and you have to hold still (with an inch clearance, you have little choice). So I sang hymns to myself and reconstructed in my mind the physics of magnetic resonance and dozed a little, and in an hour and a half it was over. (Cost $1076.)
The next day, five minutes before I was due to leave for the plane to Zurich, the oncologist called me with the results. The cancer is worse than we had thought. It started as endometrial but has spread throughout the uterus and cervix. That seems to be its limit as far as they can tell. The treatment will be five weeks of daily radiation therapy, followed by a rest, followed by a short hospitalization for a radioactive Cesium implant, followed by a rest, followed by a hysterectomy. “This will take the wind out of your sails for a good six months,” said the doctor. “OK, just so I’m up and running by gardening season,” I said.
He told me I might as well go to Zurich, so I grabbed my bag, stopped to tell Anna the news, soaked in a good hug from her, and was off.
In Zurich was the interim meeting of the Balaton Group Steering Committee, during which we plan the next year’s annual meeting and do any group business that needs to be discussed. The meeting was, as always, at the home of my dear friend Joan Davis, probably the one place in the world where I feel as completely at home as I do on the farm, primarily because of her gracious spirit. The others present were also old and dear friends — Neils Meyer from Denmark, Hartmut Bossel from Germany, Bert DeVries from the Netherlands, Chirapol Sintunawa from Thailand, and of course Dennis. I knew I was putting a strain on my body with a weekend run to Europe and back, but I also knew I’d bring a great uplift to my spirits to be with these people. And how could I miss out on Balaton work, even if over the next 6 months I won’t be the one to carry the ball?
It was a good meeting, as always. We worked hard. We decided to devote the next meeting to the task of revamping — or re-inventing — economics so that it becomes a tool for justice and sustainability, instead of a tool for exploitation and greed. We also listened to good music, cooked and ate great meals together, and shared our latest news. I was jet-lagged, with a cold, and generally tired, as I have been for the last few weeks, but the interesting discussions made me forget all that. I napped when I needed to, and they understood. Joan and Chirapol, who have their ways of mystical healing, administered vitamins, advice, and massage. I was feeling about as good as a person recently diagnosed with cancer could feel.
Just as the meeting ended the call came from New Hampshire that Anna Pluhar, our Anna, the cheery force of faith and can-do practicality on our farm, my friend and partner and almost literally my right arm, had been killed in an automobile accident.
She died instantly. It was five miles from home, in the afternoon, on a clear day. She was driving, and a truck driven by a 19-year old swung over the center line and hit her head-on. With her car were her ex-husband Ivan, who was badly injured but will recover, and her daughter Andrea, her son-in-law Kevin, and her 3-month old grandson. They were bruised and bashed, but are now OK. They were going to get a Christmas tree.
I wish I had given you a more full picture of Anna in these monthly letters. I know I’ve described her surface activities — baking the Thanksgiving turkey, reading Heather good-night stories, disciplining the fruit trees, rejoicing over the reddening of every tomato, bustling about the Upper Valley seeing to the problems of senior citizens and of affordable housing, fixing leaky faucets, writing her first book, her spiritual autobiography. But I haven’t done justice to the depths of her in these pages, nor to the wonderful friendship that grew between the two of us over the year we lived together. I’ll try to introduce you better at the end of this newsletter, for my own sake as well as for yours.
Suffice it to say here that she was 56 years old, she was active, blooming, beautiful, and in full ascendant mode into a new phase of her life, and my own self was so full of the everyday experience of her aliveness that I could make no sense of that news from the phone. I couldn’t believe it. Things that awful just don’t happen. I went into a state of shock that lasted for days.
That night, before I could get on a plane back home, was the first of several that took me to the very depths. I not only could find no faith, I simply raged against God. I tried every prayer I knew, including the mantra that had been coming so strongly through me during the cancer diagnosis period, and nothing calmed me. I was a tight little knot of grief and fear and anger. I went into endless crazy thought-sequences trying feverishly to plan and control what was so evidently unplannable and uncontrollable. What to do to help Anna’s family? How to get her book published? What would she have wanted for a memorial? How to hold together the farm and the farm family without her central presence? How to get myself through this next six months without her?
I was in no shape to deal with any of this, and fortunately my friends knew it. When I got off the plane in Boston next day, Suzanne was there to drive me home. We walked into a disheveled house just a few hours before an influx of grieving Pluhars. Suzanne lighted the fires, put me to bed, and began to clean up and create the welcome and orderliness that we all so badly needed, at this time when our lives had fallen apart. Sylvia and Heather were down in Long Island at her mother’s and would not be able to get back for a week. Don was as badly in shock as I was (he had had to handle everything all alone all weekend, supported by my great neighbor Ruth). At that moment Suzanne, who had lived here eight years, who knew the place inside and out, was exactly what was needed, and Suzanne was there.
For those of you who are wondering, is this the Suzanne who married Dennis?, Dana’s best friend who turned into Dennis’s second wife?, the answer is yes. Don’t try to figure this out, folks, don’t go by soap-opera rules. In real life the kind of simple love that has always existed among Suzanne and Dennis and me just doesn’t go away, no matter what the changes in legalities and labels. When the chips are down, that love is more important than anything.
Anna’s funeral was the day after I got back, in the Catholic church of her parish, with four priests officiating, all of whom had been spiritual advisors to her over the years. In the front row sat her four beautiful children and their various spouses, and her baby grandson, and her mother. In the second row were her brother and his family and Curley her “gentleman friend” and Don and Suzanne and me. Behind us were hundreds of friends and neighbors; lots of people in this Valley knew and loved Anna. I have to admit they were kind of a blur to me; my attention was on my own grief and that of her family.
Catholic funerals are long and sentimental, with every possible inducement to bring out tears. In those first two rows we more or less held each other up while we took turns sobbing. It was excruciating. I hate crying in public, and I was completely helpless against it. Afterward I saw the reason for it. All of us, especially those shattered kids of hers, had the opportunity to pour out our grief. After it was over there was a sort of emotional calm. They all came back to the farm — there were 40 people there that night (thank God for Suzanne!) — and we were able to talk more or less sanely about Anna and how much we loved her and about the practicalities we’re going to have to deal with jointly to put our own lives back together and to close hers down as she would want us to.
The “four sibs” as they call themselves stayed a week, visiting their father in the hospital, comforting each other and me. Somehow I managed to get out a column that week (not one of the most brilliant I’ve ever produced) and I got to the hospital for my own doctor’s appointments. Beyond that I didn’t do much. I didn’t have any heart or strength.
What I couldn’t see in those dark days — and can see now — is that things do mend, though they don’t come back to where they were. The universe has its healing powers, as well as its incomprehensible destructive ones. Little by little those of us who loved Anna are getting beyond the shock, learning to let go and to see her as a gift in our lives that couldn’t last forever. One unexpected gift arising from this tragedy is that her son Karel will be living with us for awhile. He and Anna had been talking about that anyway — he’d been thinking he’d like to come back to the Upper Valley. Now, with his father recuperating here, with his mother’s belongings to deal with, with his three sisters in the Boston area, and with the farm badly needing someone, it seems clear that this is the time.
Another gift is that several members of Anna’s family have been here every weekend (and Ivan convalesced here for a few days after he left the hospital). They’ll all be arriving tomorrow to have Christmas here the way Anna had planned. I’ve had no chance to be lonely. And I’ve had a chance to work through my grief and to get to know Anna better through her family. It will be a terribly sad Christmas, but that’s the only kind that’s appropriate right now.
Numbly I’ve been learning to rearrange my life, without Anna and with cancer. Things have become very simple. Keep the woodstove going. (This is the coldest December I can remember. The thermometer just hit zero as I type this, at 8 P.M. It’ll be 20 below by morning.) Go to all doctor and radiation appointments. When I feel alert try to write. When I don’t feel alert, take a nap. I have about half the energy I normally do, but so far I’ve kept the column and the book going, and I intend to continue. A huge load has fallen onto my farm-mates, especially Sylvia, but Karel is learning how things work, and after Christmas we may try to find someone else to live here too.
I’m now into the second week of radiation therapy. Every afternoon at 3:45 I walk across the street from my office, go to the sub-basement of the Norris Cotton Cancer Center, lie down on a table, and get zapped. The zapper is not a radioactive cobalt source as I had originally thought (that technology is now archaic) but an on-line linear accelerator that smashes a beam of electrons against a tungsten/copper target, which then showers forth a rain of photons and electrons at the exact frequencies and quantities of radiation desired. There are no radioactive materials to dispose of at the end. (I’m keeping an eye on this hospital’s environmental practices.)
They align me with four beautiful red laser beams, all directed to intersect with three tattoos on my stomach. (Yes! Real tattoos! Made with needles! I asked the technician if she does roses, but she only does little spots.) They slip into the machine some lead shields, made to my personal measurements, which keep the radiation away from where it’s not supposed to go. (They will melt down the lead shields at the end and reform them for someone else.) The whole machine rotates around me so they can come at me from any angle. Zap. Turn the machine. Zap. Turn the machine. Zap. Turn the machine. Zap. Turn the machine. And I’m done for the day. Takes fifteen minutes. (Costs $132. Every day.)
I have to admit to getting off on all this technology. It brings back my old, long-neglected biophysics self. I insisted on seeing all my X-rays and magnetic resonance images (I never knew I had so many muscles in my ass!). I bug my doctors with questions. On the other had, I’m also mad at these processes, because I know they’re the exact equivalent of spraying a whole countryside with poison to get rid of a few little bugs. Spraying a whole body with radiation, poisoning its own healing mechanisms, to get rid of a few rogue cells. It’s the Nuke Your Irritant mentality. I hate it.
But I have spent years researching the gentler alternatives to pesticides, and not one minute researching the wholistic alternatives to radiation and surgery — and my doctors are no more likely to tell me about them than a pesticide salesman is likely to tell a farmer about integrated pest management. Slowly I am finding the alternative healing networks in this Valley, but they are subterranean, and I don’t yet have confidence in them.
I do have confidence in my doctors — to be highly skilled, perfect practitioners of the Nuke ‘Em school of modern medicine. I do feel safe in their hands and in the processes ahead of me. Though I’m physically weak, and I don’t expect to get stronger for a few months, I’m happy in the thought that the treatments have started and that the cancer is getting weaker a lot faster than I am. I think of those radiation zaps as streams of golden energy pouring in to heal me.
I also know again something I completely lost sight of during the week after Anna’s death — I’m going to get through this. If I forget again, my friends will remind me. I can’t begin to tell you of the outpouring of support, of wonderful sharing, of love that has come to me this month — including from many of you. Here are just a few examples.
The week before she died Anna stopped off at her former monastery and put the nuns to work praying for my recovery.
Chirapol went back to Bangkok to speak to the big Buddha in the Buddha Park about the same matter.
Wendy Walsh has her group of New Age feminists sending healing vibes my way
Csaba Csaki sent from Hungary the herbal mixture that all Budapest swears by as a certain cure for cancer.
Joan Davis is personally overseeing my intake of vitamins and homeopathic medicines.
Marianne Buettner sent from Brattleboro an enormous paper hug, complete with enfolding arms and a big pink heart to press against my heart. Her husband Pete, who has also experienced the adventure of cancer, is forwarding all kinds of inspirational readings about the body and the mind.
Suzanne has loaned me her favorite, soft cashmere scarf, which not only keeps my neck warm but has magical healing properties.
As I came out from my first radiation treatment, Karel was there to meet me with a bunch of flowers.
John Zimmer shows up now and then to help with farm projects and brings hot soup for lunch.
Neighbor Ruth calls up or pops in to provide hugs, comfort, a listening ear, and practical help.
My OA buddies are invoking their personal Higher Powers on my behalf.
My Mom walks under the big Oklahoma sky every night and talks to The Man Upstairs about me.
These are all manifestations of the love that holds together the universe, translating itself through us mortal, uncomprehending, imperfect, generous, outreaching, doubting, struggling, magnificent human beings.
How could any cancer hold out against all this?
Love, Dana
When you’re inside you hear strange clanking noises and every now and then they tell you they’re going to do a 12 minute scan or a 20 minute scan and you have to hold still (with an inch clearance, you have little choice). So I sang hymns to myself and reconstructed in my mind the physics of magnetic resonance and dozed a little, and in an hour and a half it was over. (Cost $1076.)
The next day, five minutes before I was due to leave for the plane to Zurich, the oncologist called me with the results. The cancer is worse than we had thought. It started as endometrial but has spread throughout the uterus and cervix. That seems to be its limit as far as they can tell. The treatment will be five weeks of daily radiation therapy, followed by a rest, followed by a short hospitalization for a radioactive Cesium implant, followed by a rest, followed by a hysterectomy. “This will take the wind out of your sails for a good six months,” said the doctor. “OK, just so I’m up and running by gardening season,” I said.
He told me I might as well go to Zurich, so I grabbed my bag, stopped to tell Anna the news, soaked in a good hug from her, and was off.
In Zurich was the interim meeting of the Balaton Group Steering Committee, during which we plan the next year’s annual meeting and do any group business that needs to be discussed. The meeting was, as always, at the home of my dear friend Joan Davis, probably the one place in the world where I feel as completely at home as I do on the farm, primarily because of her gracious spirit. The others present were also old and dear friends — Neils Meyer from Denmark, Hartmut Bossel from Germany, Bert DeVries from the Netherlands, Chirapol Sintunawa from Thailand, and of course Dennis. I knew I was putting a strain on my body with a weekend run to Europe and back, but I also knew I’d bring a great uplift to my spirits to be with these people. And how could I miss out on Balaton work, even if over the next 6 months I won’t be the one to carry the ball?
It was a good meeting, as always. We worked hard. We decided to devote the next meeting to the task of revamping — or re-inventing — economics so that it becomes a tool for justice and sustainability, instead of a tool for exploitation and greed. We also listened to good music, cooked and ate great meals together, and shared our latest news. I was jet-lagged, with a cold, and generally tired, as I have been for the last few weeks, but the interesting discussions made me forget all that. I napped when I needed to, and they understood. Joan and Chirapol, who have their ways of mystical healing, administered vitamins, advice, and massage. I was feeling about as good as a person recently diagnosed with cancer could feel.
Just as the meeting ended the call came from New Hampshire that Anna Pluhar, our Anna, the cheery force of faith and can-do practicality on our farm, my friend and partner and almost literally my right arm, had been killed in an automobile accident.
She died instantly. It was five miles from home, in the afternoon, on a clear day. She was driving, and a truck driven by a 19-year old swung over the center line and hit her head-on. With her car were her ex-husband Ivan, who was badly injured but will recover, and her daughter Andrea, her son-in-law Kevin, and her 3-month old grandson. They were bruised and bashed, but are now OK. They were going to get a Christmas tree.
I wish I had given you a more full picture of Anna in these monthly letters. I know I’ve described her surface activities — baking the Thanksgiving turkey, reading Heather good-night stories, disciplining the fruit trees, rejoicing over the reddening of every tomato, bustling about the Upper Valley seeing to the problems of senior citizens and of affordable housing, fixing leaky faucets, writing her first book, her spiritual autobiography. But I haven’t done justice to the depths of her in these pages, nor to the wonderful friendship that grew between the two of us over the year we lived together. I’ll try to introduce you better at the end of this newsletter, for my own sake as well as for yours.
Suffice it to say here that she was 56 years old, she was active, blooming, beautiful, and in full ascendant mode into a new phase of her life, and my own self was so full of the everyday experience of her aliveness that I could make no sense of that news from the phone. I couldn’t believe it. Things that awful just don’t happen. I went into a state of shock that lasted for days.
That night, before I could get on a plane back home, was the first of several that took me to the very depths. I not only could find no faith, I simply raged against God. I tried every prayer I knew, including the mantra that had been coming so strongly through me during the cancer diagnosis period, and nothing calmed me. I was a tight little knot of grief and fear and anger. I went into endless crazy thought-sequences trying feverishly to plan and control what was so evidently unplannable and uncontrollable. What to do to help Anna’s family? How to get her book published? What would she have wanted for a memorial? How to hold together the farm and the farm family without her central presence? How to get myself through this next six months without her?
I was in no shape to deal with any of this, and fortunately my friends knew it. When I got off the plane in Boston next day, Suzanne was there to drive me home. We walked into a dissheveled house just a few hours before an influx of grieving Pluhars. Suzanne lighted the fires, put me to bed, and began to clean up and create the welcome and orderliness that we all so badly needed, at this time when our lives had fallen apart. Sylvia and Heather were down in Long Island at her mother’s and would not be able to get back for a week. Don was as badly in shock as I was (he had had to handle everything all alone all weekend, supported by my great neighbor Ruth). At that moment Suzanne, who had lived here eight years, who knew the place inside and out, was exactly what was needed, and Suzanne was there.
For those of you who are wondering, is this the Suzanne who married Dennis?, Dana’s best friend who turned into Dennis’s second wife?, the answer is yes. Don’t try to figure this out, folks, don’t go by soap-opera rules. In real life the kind of simple love that has always existed among Suzanne and Dennis and me just doesn’t go away, no matter what the changes in legalities and labels. When the chips are down, that love is more important than anything.
Anna’s funeral was the day after I got back, in the Catholic church of her parish, with four priests officiating, all of whom had been spiritual advisors to her over the years. In the front row sat her four beautiful children and their various spouses, and her baby grandson, and her mother. In the second row were her brother and his family and Curley her “gentleman friend” and Don and Suzanne and me. Behind us were hundreds of friends and neighbors; lots of people in this Valley knew and loved Anna. I have to admit they were kind of a blur to me; my attention was on my own grief and that of her family.
Catholic funerals are long and sentimental, with every possible inducement to bring out tears. In those first two rows we more or less held each other up while we took turns sobbing. It was excruciating. I hate crying in public, and I was completely helpless against it. Afterward I saw the reason for it. All of us, especially those shattered kids of hers, had the opportunity to pour out our grief. After it was over there was a sort of emotional calm. They all came back to the farm — there were 40 people there that night (thank God for Suzanne!) — and we were able to talk more or less sanely about Anna and how much we loved her and about the practicalities we’re going to have to deal with jointly to put our own lives back together and to close hers down as she would want us to.
The “four sibs” as they call themselves stayed a week, visiting their father in the hospital, comforting each other and me. Somehow I managed to get out a column that week (not one of the most brilliant I’ve ever produced) and I got to the hospital for my own doctor’s appointments. Beyond that I didn’t do much. I didn’t have any heart or strength.
What I couldn’t see in those dark days — and can see now — is that things do mend, though they don’t come back to where they were. The universe has its healing powers, as well as its incomprehensible destructive ones. Little by little those of us who loved Anna are getting beyond the shock, learning to let go and to see her as a gift in our lives that couldn’t last forever. One unexpected gift arising from this tragedy is that her son Karel will be living with us for awhile. He and Anna had been talking about that anyway — he’d been thinking he’d like to come back to the Upper Valley. Now, with his father recuperating here, with his mother’s belongings to deal with, with his three sisters in the Boston area, and with the farm badly needing someone, it seems clear that this is the time.
Another gift is that several members of Anna’s family have been here every weekend (and Ivan convalesced here for a few days after he left the hospital). They’ll all be arriving tomorrow to have Christmas here the way Anna had planned. I’ve had no chance to be lonely. And I’ve had a chance to work through my grief and to get to know Anna better through her family. It will be a terribly sad Christmas, but that’s the only kind that’s appropriate right now.
Numbly I’ve been learning to rearrange my life, without Anna and with cancer. Things have become very simple. Keep the woodstove going. (This is the coldest December I can remember. The thermometer just hit zero as I type this, at 8 P.M. It’ll be 20 below by morning.) Go to all doctor and radiation appointments. When I feel alert try to write. When I don’t feel alert, take a nap. I have about half the energy I normally do, but so far I’ve kept the column and the book going, and I intend to continue. A huge load has fallen onto my farm-mates, especially Sylvia, but Karel is learning how things work, and after Christmas we may try to find someone else to live here too.
I’m now into the second week of radiation therapy. Every afternoon at 3:45 I walk across the street from my office, go to the sub-basement of the Norris Cotton Cancer Center, lie down on a table, and get zapped. The zapper is not a radioactive cobalt source as I had originally thought (that technology is now archaic) but an on-line linear accelerator that smashes a beam of electrons against a tungsten/copper target, which then showers forth a rain of photons and electrons at the exact frequencies and quantities of radiation desired. There are no radioactive materials to dispose of at the end. (I’m keeping an eye on this hospital’s environmental practices.)
They align me with four beautiful red laser beams, all directed to intersect with three tattoos on my stomach. (Yes! Real tattoos! Made with needles! I asked the technician if she does roses, but she only does little spots.) They slip into the machine some lead shields, made to my personal measurements, which keep the radiation away from where it’s not supposed to go. (They will melt down the lead shields at the end and reform them for someone else.) The whole machine rotates around me so they can come at me from any angle. Zap. Turn the machine. Zap. Turn the machine. Zap. Turn the machine. Zap. Turn the machine. And I’m done for the day. Takes fifteen minutes. (Costs $132. Every day.)
I have to admit to getting off on all this technology. It brings back my old, long-neglected biophysics self. I insisted on seeing all my X-rays and magnetic resonance images (I never knew I had so many muscles in my ass!). I bug my doctors with questions. On the other had, I’m also mad at these processes, because I know they’re the exact equivalent of spraying a whole countryside with poison to get rid of a few little bugs. Spraying a whole body with radiation, poisoning its own healing mechanisms, to get rid of a few rogue cells. It’s the Nuke Your Irritant mentality. I hate it.
But I have spent years researching the gentler alternatives to pesticides, and not one minute researching the wholistic alternatives to radiation and surgery — and my doctors are no more likely to tell me about them than a pesticide salesman is likely to tell a farmer about integrated pest management. Slowly I am finding the alternative healing networks in this Valley, but they are subterranean, and I don’t yet have confidence in them.
I do have confidence in my doctors — to be highly skilled, perfect practitioners of the Nuke ‘Em school of modern medicine. I do feel safe in their hands and in the processes ahead of me. Though I’m physically weak, and I don’t expect to get stronger for a few months, I’m happy in the thought that the treatments have started and that the cancer is getting weaker a lot faster than I am. I think of those radiation zaps as streams of golden energy pouring in to heal me.
I also know again something I completely lost sight of during the week after Anna’s death — I’m going to get through this. If I forget again, my friends will remind me. I can’t begin to tell you of the outpouring of support, of wonderful sharing, of love that has come to me this month — including from many of you. Here are just a few examples.
The week before she died Anna stopped off at her former monastery and put the nuns to work praying for my recovery.
Chirapol went back to Bangkok to speak to the big Buddha in the Buddha Park about the same matter.
Wendy Walsh has her group of New Age feminists sending healing vibes my way
Csaba Csaki sent from Hungary the herbal mixture that all Budapest swears by as a certain cure for cancer.
Joan Davis is personally overseeing my intake of vitamins and homeopathic medicines.
Marianne Buettner sent from Brattleboro an enormous paper hug, complete with enfolding arms and a big pink heart to press against my heart. Her husband Pete, who has also experienced the adventure of cancer, is forwarding all kinds of inspirational readings about the body and the mind.
Suzanne has loaned me her favorite, soft cashmere scarf, which not only keeps my neck warm but has magical healing properties.
As I came out from my first radiation treatment, Karel was there to meet me with a bunch of flowers.
John Zimmer shows up now and then to help with farm projects and brings hot soup for lunch.
Neighbor Ruth calls up or pops in to provide hugs, comfort, a listening ear, and practical help.
My OA buddies are invoking their personal Higher Powers on my behalf.
My Mom walks under the big Oklahoma sky every night and talks to The Man Upstairs about me.
These are all manifestations of the love that holds together the universe, translating itself through us mortal, uncomprehending, imperfect, generous, outreaching, doubting, struggling, magnificent human beings.
How could any cancer hold out against all this?
Love, Dana
