So, today, I come to you from the infamous Carey bus that takes one from New York City to the local airports. I am headed to JFK to go to Houston (ironic, given the tone of my Dallas piece, yesterday) to see my mother in the hospital. We don’t see eachother very often, but she is ill, so I wanted to make sure I saw her.
She has cancer. This is her second leg of the disease. In 2004, she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, which we’d heard was amongst the better cancers to get if you had to get one at all. Sadly, there’s a good amount of prevention that goes into it after you get cancer the first time. Right diet, exercise…etc. All the things we’re really supposed to do anyway. There are days that I am so enraged that since 2004 she didn’t do a better job of caring for herself – because not one of those items mentioned above did she do. Especially when considering the fact that both of her parents died from cancer at 73. She is only 64There have been days when I’ve anguished over the same choices in my own life. Though, I hope to never hear ‘cancer’ mentioned in my eventual list of ailments. Sadly, all we can do for ourselves and our loved ones is be the best we can be. We should eat right…but most do not. We could drink less…but that’d be hard for me, too. We make the choice of longer life against shorter-term pleasure every day. No different than our current economic picture, our fate is no different than with our health.