In the midst of life is death

In just a couple of days I am leaving for a trip to Paris for 5 days with my girlfriend Therese. Part of the reason I am posting is to get back into the swing of posting, with the idea that I will do some blogging while I am on vacation, to let you know about the adventures we are having in France.

But I also in the middle of all this excitement acknowledge that I am also feeling a great deal of sadness these days, as a roommate of mine goes through her last days after undergoing treatment for breast cancer for about a year. Her West Coast family members are here in New York with her in the hospital, and the end is near. She is a very private person and for a long time she expressed to me that she preferred I not share her struggle with people. But at this point, I feel it is doing a disservice to her not to say something about her since she is important to me.

We have never been very close friends. She has rubbed me (and my other roommate) the wrong way on a regular basis during the time we have shared an apartment. She is very proud and a bit of a control freak, so that attempts to reach out to her and give her a hand with things were often rebuffed. She would love to tell us at great length about the dramas going on in her life, and it wasn't always clear whether she cared very much what was going on in our lives.

Nevertheless, she is a very intelligent person, a person with many interests similar to my own. At one time we used to watch episodes of Battlestar Gallactica, a tv science fiction series, together, for example. After she displayed some jealousy toward me when I started dating somebody, I rooted for her to find a boyfriend. She is definitely someone like many New Yorkers who needs a sounding board, someone she can share with all the little things going on in her life, and it seemed like that has often been lacking.

So when she became ill, I was rooting for her very hard, and I was happy to lend a sympathetic ear to her and listen to the trials and tribulations of negotiating the minefield of health care and hospitals and doctors. And for a long time, she seemed to be almost holding her own - if she was slipping, it was so gradual as to be almost undetectible.

Recently that all changed. She came home from a trip to the hospital a different person. I hoped that my sense that she was spiralling downward was wrong. But sure enough, things were not going well. And now, it is just a matter of time.

There are all the logistics to eventually grapple with - paying the rent and utilities, applying the security or returning it to a family member, clearing out her belongings, eventually thinking about getting a new roommate in. All those things I will deal with when I return from my trip. Everything will be sorted out in time.

One last point. I thought of an ironic coincidence or parallel. Four years ago, my cat Hobbs was deathly ill and ended up dying less than a week before I left for a vacation to the Southwest U.S. with a previous girlfriend. He struggled for a long while with illness, but in his last week all of a sudden his body was riddled with cancer.

Here again, I am going away, carrying with me the sadness of knowing someone who is at the end, who took a dramatic downturn. Until a week or so ago, she was telling me about optimistic diagnoses, about further treatments that were expected to turn the tide for her. Now her body is so riddled with cancer there is nothing to be done.

It's a cliche, life being a miracle. Something that can be snatched from us in a moment. Every moment a gift. It feels idiotic to even bring up these cliches at a time like this. But the older you get, the more you see all the people who mean something to you, all the things that mean something to you, disappearing. And our own bodies grow frail and begin to fail us. So I for one will celebrate life while it remains the arena in which I operate, knowing that one day things will be different. Or to quote Walt Whitman, "the powerful play [still] goes on, and [I] may [yet] contribute a verse."