There are some moments when everything calms down and all you can hear is your blood rushing in your ears. Waiting for the doctor to get on the phone to tell you the results of your scans is like that. And both times in the last 24 hours, the doctors we cajoled into telling us the news early (because Stan is on holiday), have told us GOOD NEWS. “Nothing malignant, other than what is already known” is what they say, and those turn out to be the most beautiful words ever.
So it’s still a bit of a trial—this is not the good news that lets me just get back to my life unhampered. There’s still surgery and radiotherapy. And then there’s hoping hoping hoping again that this is the last time I see this cancer.
But the alternative, the stage iv path, was horrific. When I told Aidan he danced around his room. “YESSSS! My mom isn’t going to die!” It’s been a hard week.
Thank you for all of the well wishes and pictures of dawns all over the world. Thank you for all of the many ways you have supported me. I will still be posting here about this next chapter of the cancer journey, but it is a much less frightening ride than it might have been.
I hope dawn is beautiful wherever you are…
25,000 dawns 
Jenny – Good News!!! No Great News!!!
The family will have another reason to celebrate in Seattle next week. And – no sleepless nights there for you.
All our love,
Jane and John
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So so so wonderful – and a poem for us all:
A Word For Joy
I am happy among children’s eyes
I am very worried and happy
among the crazy and the hopeless
they recognize me, right away
I’m home
And there is nowhere I would rather be
alive or dead
than in this world
Inside this skull I hold and ponder
unending space expanding if I understand correctly
at an accelerating rate, meanwhile
housing perpetual births and disappearances of its numberless
deafening nuclear furnaces unheard,
I consider the voices, identically soundless, in every
mind, behind each face I pass
and as I’ve been instructed each morning
on rising I obliterate the print of my body
and am glad (the wind is blowing, it is written, adore
the wind)
and am speechlessly grateful and glad and afraid
I don’t mind saying that I am scared
to death of God: I am
afraid and blind and ignorant and naked and
I’ll take it!
I have been happy here
among all the suffering eyes: why they were brought here
and exactly what it was they were expected
to take a good close look at,
I can’t grasp it, but I am so very glad.
~ Franz Wright ~
(God’s Silence)
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This is so so so wonderful.
So a poem for us all:
A Word For Joy
I am happy among children’s eyes
I am very worried and happy
among the crazy and the hopeless
they recognize me, right away
I’m home
And there is nowhere I would rather be
alive or dead
than in this world
Inside this skull I hold and ponder
unending space expanding if I understand correctly
at an accelerating rate, meanwhile
housing perpetual births and disappearances of its numberless
deafening nuclear furnaces unheard,
I consider the voices, identically soundless, in every
mind, behind each face I pass
and as I’ve been instructed each morning
on rising I obliterate the print of my body
and am glad (the wind is blowing, it is written, adore
the wind)
and am speechlessly grateful and glad and afraid
I don’t mind saying that I am scared
to death of God: I am
afraid and blind and ignorant and naked and
I’ll take it!
I have been happy here
among all the suffering eyes: why they were brought here
and exactly what it was they were expected
to take a good close look at,
I can’t grasp it, but I am so very glad.
~ Franz Wright ~
(God’s Silence)
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My Sweet Jennifer…please tell Aidan that he has dance partners in Arlington, Virginia!
I worry about sending poems/reflections for fear that they might sound prescriptive…like I know what meaning you should be making of your experience. I don’t, but I have stories–and they are all based on hope and the incredible Jennifer I know becoming even more Jennifer.
So, I offer you this lovely reflection on the evolution of kindness…because my story is that your experience is redemptive for all humankind…moving you and all of us into greater kindness.
love you, michael
Kindness
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.
Naomi Shihab Nye
from The Words Under the Words: Selected Poems
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Jennifer, thank you for sharing your ongoing journey with us, the great, the not so great, the bad, and everything in between and all ’round. Happy Monday to you and your lovely family.
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