What a difference one phone call makes! My CAT scan is normal. No additional tumors that the surgery missed. Still chemo ahead of me. But. I’ve been anxious. And gloomy. With each previous test, I’d been a bit nonchalant, since I felt fine. I’ve always been so healthy, yet each time the results have been worse than I imagined. Keats’ sonnet has played in my head: “When I have fears that I may cease to be/ before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain. . . .” I especially know his mood at the end of the poem: “then on the shore / Of the wide world I stand alone, and think, / Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.”I’ve stared into space, feeling alone, even with all the love and friends. I have also thought—okay, I’m a literary sort of person—of D. H. Lawrence’s short story, “Odor of Chrysanthemums,” in which the widow and others scrub the dead body of her husband and she’s struck by the utter otherness, the solitariness that’s always been there.
Then the Sandy Hook School murders. My own dear children (pictured, Kelly with her youngest, Abby) came to spend last weekend with me, Kelly from D.C. and Scott from New Jersey. I was happy to have that “normal” time with them before I begin chemo. We sat around the table watching the memorial service, all of us tearing up or crying. Kelly, who has four children, said she thought she couldn’t endure that, as a mother, unless she had a thought of some life after death, of something continuing. Scott, who has two children, said no, those thoughts diminish the preciousness of the life we have. This is what we have, and it’s up to us to use it the best we can. 
Can they both be right? Buddhists have been studying human consciousness for thousands of years. Only lately Western science and thought are beginning to catch up. We’re just beginning to understand that the ego, what we’ve called our “selves,” is a construct. We developed it over our lives. We’ve convinced ourselves that we live within its small box. The idea of not living inside it seems tantamount to not existing.The good news is that we don’t live there. It’s a fiction. What is real is huge, spacious, and interconnected with everything else. This is a way of putting it, at least. We do and we don’t die. Our bodies die, but we don’t die in the sense that what we thought was “us” didn’t exist in the first place.St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, Hildegard of Bingan, the Buddha, all of them encountered the vastness that has no name, that has no “religion,” that is just what it is, the great “I Am.” They found it perfect, complete. They found that they lived in both worlds, the provisional one that has beginnings and endings and toothaches and squabbles and the other, eternal one. And both of them are the same thing. And not.Jerry got the snow-blower started at last, in time for the big snow coming. The Dr. called to say his hemoglobin is, after all, normal. I may get to start chemo before Christmas. Things are looking up.