Last December I wrote, “The moment I heard the word cancer, I could feel myself cross a threshold, on the side now of those who know they’ll die.” I’m reporting to you, after nine months, including a lovely summer, that it IS a threshold. One can’t cross back over it.
Recently I ran across a poem by Chicago poet Debra Bruce (who's also had cancer) that gets at this. Others are “snug in their skins.” She can never again even pretend ennui. “Fear’s rare air” affords a panoramic view. It is as if she floats above the everyday obsessions. Yet at the same time, she plunges herself into them so as not to be “found” by disaster.
Ariel View
Shot from her life not once but twice,she slips her healthy body back on but can’t quite fitamong those friends snug in their skinswho marvel in murmurs at her return,who think that after such a flight, her drinkwill always be spiked. It’s true:ennui’s fake silks now slide right off her,but up there
in the air, she preferredher place below in a pack of groundlings—ordering clothes from a catalog,searching for an herbalist to ruba liniment so profoundly into her fleshshe was bound by heat to stay down.
She doesn’t care if fear’s rare airaffords a panoramic view.Let daily errands run her around,and if disaster asks her whereaboutsagain, let’s say we’ve seen hereverywhere but that she cannot be found.
--Debra Bruce (from Survivor's Picnic, 2I012)
So, you bonk anyone on the head with the fact of her mortality and she’s going to wake up to her life, to some extent! She's going to become loosened from what seemed so immediate and crucial before. And she’s also going to be newly and sharply aware that she can’t control things.
I suppose one reaction to that knowledge may be a greater desire to control—more visits to the doctor/herbalist/acupuncturist, etc., an obsessive concern with food and exercise, a renewed devotion to religious practice and ritual, for example. Not that these aren’t all worthy and helpful. The operative word is “obsessive.”
Another reaction might be a greater relaxation into the moment: this is my life. It’s what I have, now. I never had anything more than that, but now I see it. Wally likes this idea. 
In any case, there does seem to be a separation, a distance between “me” and those who’ve not yet seen their mortality staring them in the face, and also between “me” and my everyday passions, my desires, my joys and my sorrows. They’re all there, but I don’t seem to live inside them the way I used to.
Recently I had a moment of fear, and I imagined it all the way out to the end: my death. At each step, it was only what it was—not any overarching concept or ideas about death, which might scare me to death—but only a step-by-step letting go. When I got to the last step, it was only a cessation of breathing.
Not to leave you with that! We’re having, I think, the last of the summer-like warmth. Yesterday I took out the kayak, had a long swim, and Jerry and I had a beautiful canoe ride. I spent a while on the end of the dock with a book. I’m reading Jim Harrison’s True North, set mostly in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. I'm enjoying "being in" the places we visited last fall in our first trip up north.
I wanted also to let you know, the launch of my new book of poems, No Need of Sympathy, will be at Brilliant Books in Traverse City on October 12, 7:00. I’d love it if you could come. My publisher, BOA Editions, just nominated the book for the Kingsley Tufts Award, which in itself feels like an honor. If I win, the prize is $100,000! And you didn't think there was money in poetry! 