Conversations

An unexpected and welcome gift out of all this is "conversations" with friends, mostly via e-mail. By telling my story, it has elicited stories from others. Some, of course, about their long-ago successful battle with cancer that I never knew about.
Other conversations have been wonderful reminiscences about early married life, that first apartment together in Manhattan and working out a life together.
I have also enjoyed discussing the many different was some of us have parented in an effort to raise healthy, productive children. We, for example, were a team sports family. One of my favorite things was to cheer from the sidelines, starting with Little League and moving onto softball, football, lacrosse, field hockey and basketball. A friend, on the other hand, did individual sports, cycling, etc. And while we went off to the Cape for a couple of weeks in summer, her family went to Latin America!
And then there was the story from a friend who was a health care professional whose adoption came through at the same time she learned her mother was dying. With the support of her husband she took the baby to her mother's. She tells of her big family all pitching in with night baby feedings as well as late night care of her mother and "discovering that the 'work' of family was so much more important than the professional career [she] had always put first."
Others have shared their own grief process. It is amazing how individualized it is. One friend said when she got the news her mother was dying, she just cried for a whole day. Then, she never shed another tear, even at the funeral.
When an old friend drove down from Maine, via Boston, in last week's snowstorm, we of course shared family photos, that now include grandchildren. And what struck her is that with this process, it allows me to continue to live in not only the past, but also the present as well as the future.