>Shift

January 3, 2011

>Several days ago, before the New Year, I was invited over for an impromptu midday fete. Just one more reason to celebrate before the holidays officially wrapped up on New Year’s Eve.

The day was sunny. The sky was blue. The mood was…festive.

Turns out, the reason for the gathering was not, after all, just one more reason to celebrate.

It was an opportunity for a very dear friend to gather her very dear friends together in the same room and, face, to face, beg for our prayers and support in the coming year.

Breast cancer.

The next hour is a blur. We cried together, we prayed together. The moments that followed were sacred and terrible. Just women, gathered, weeping, our arms wrapped around one another and tissues fluttering to the floor with our tears.

As I left her house, I stood on the steps and I felt the ground move. A shift in the very fabric over the earth. I looked at the sky and found it to be a different color.

I had to stop by the grocery store on the way home. There, amidst the milk and the eggs and the Panko crumbs were words like

Chemo.

Radiation.

Mastectomy.

She told us that chemotherapy requires you to die in order to live. For those of my acquaintance who have suffered so, the saying is quite true. A living death, with a silken thread of promise.

Just a thread. No more.

It is hard to return to the daily mundane and not feel the shift in the atmosphere. The world has changed, the ground has moved. I do not know what the coming year holds for her, for her children and her husband.

I do know one thing for certain – this is what it means to be held. Even when the answer is “no” we are held, we are held.