Amy Welborn points to this review of a collection of columns by WaPo columnist Marjorie Williams, who died at age 47 of cancer. She left behind two young children. I was struck by this bit:
But the real anchor of the section, the stunning, unflinching "Hit by Lightning: A Cancer Memoir," leaves behind the world of other people’s ambition and focuses instead on her own, which was far more urgent: to cheat death, at least for a time.
"Having found myself faced with that old bull-session question (What would you do if you found out you had a year to live?)," she wrote, "I learned that a woman with children has the privilege or duty of bypassing the existential. What you do, if you have little kids, is lead as normal a life as possible, only with more pancakes."
Amy comments:
Not much time, not much time. Yes, eternity awaits, but if the time we have on earth didn’t matter- we wouldn’t have been given it.
Important thoughts. Incidentally, I had a dream last night that I knew I had only a few days to live. It was realistic enough that when I woke in the morning dark I believed, for a moment, that I was still in it. Wish I remembered more details.
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