Questions? Comments? Please Write. …

He felt his heart pounding fiercely in his chest. How strange that in his dread of death, it pumped all the harder, valiantly keeping him alive. But it would have to stop, and soon. Its beats were numbered. How many would there be time for…?

Slowly, very slowly, he sat up, and as he did so he felt more alive and more aware of his own living body than ever before. Why had he never appreciated what a miracle he was, brain and nerve and bounding heart?...

He stood up. His heart was leaping against his ribs like a frantic bird. Perhaps it knew it had little time left, perhaps it was determined to fulfill a lifetime’s beats before the end.

~ J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Dear G-d,

First, I want to thank you for the jumping dance moves that candle flames do, and the curvaceous languid movement of smoke. I want to thank you for the subtle colored ring that sometimes encircles the moon at night. And wind turbines and the impressive horizon they mark over miles and miles of American landscape.

I want to thank you for anything that even feels like it resembles velvet, and for tissue boxes.

I want to thank you for doors, and for my awesome yellow rainboots that allow me to walk directly into the several-inch deep streaming gutter and splosh in the fresh rainfall and smile gleefully and with pure pleasure.

Next, I want to call you into question. For holocausts, with the big and small “H.” For that child who got killed in Les Mis, but who really represents all the children who have died fighting oppression.

I want to call you into question for Aaron, again, even though you’ve told me his overdose was necessary to bring him out of his suffering.

I want to call you into question for my lab counts today.

Which told me that my white blood count has gone down when it shouldn’t have.

Which told me that my immune system is failing for reasons that are plausibly explicable by a recurrence of my cancer.

I want to call you into question for the challenges that turn ordinary people into fighters, and inspirations, and martyrs.

For the challenges that create the monk in Tiananmen Square.

I want to call you into question for the challenges that demanded the untimely death of Alexander McQueen. Really.

My doctor has told me to come into the lab on Monday to check my counts again, to follow the trending of my white cells, if they are indeed going down or if it was a fluke somehow. So, there is nothing for me to worry about now, except that I can’t help but allow the intruding thought of "Recurrence" to frighten me, and to empower me – once a-goddamned-gain – to say, I’m not ready to die. I’m not fucking nearly ready to die.

I would perhaps here again praise something pretty, like the fern, in order to create the proper "compliment sandwich" appropriate for professional feedback, but I’d like to assume you’ve run directly from reading this letter to correct this fluke in my blood as quickly as possible.

Because, as you know, I have a plane to Hawaii to catch. 

Yours, in admiration,

Molly