Cancer magic

Cancer can really alter your mindset.  If you're lucky, before it kills you it can change the way you and those close to you experience being alive.  It's a bizare thing to both dread and cherish  something as double edged as a terminal illness.  It's not my body; it's not my life, so it seems unfair that it gives me the gift (only occasionally)  of those crystal moments of feeling the breathtaking beauty of being alive.  

Usually I'm mired in all the things I should have gotten done that I haven't.  Two days a week tied up in treatment and the residue of dealing with Gil's sleeplessness doesn't always leave me philosophical     but     

when I get my head out of the muck

I see the guy I married as the precious generous spirit I married , and the egg laying chickens who (twice!) walked through the electric fence in the pasture I was trying to move them in to as my teachers about the power of home and the familiar and that, with patience, I will be able to bring them to grass (next year, next year, [the gardener's chorus])

Cancer shakes me out of my sense of entitlement.  What I got  is   WHAT I'VE GOT! 

and I'm grateful.