What the Diagnosis Changed

I received a cancer diagnosis on a Thursday and spent the weekend in a kind of numb terror. By Sunday I was not better, but something had shifted. I had been living my entire adult life oriented toward a future I was building — career, savings, plans. The diagnosis collapsed all of that. And in the collapse, sitting in my backyard in Tucson watching the sun go down, I had the clearest sense I have ever had of what actually mattered. Not an audible voice. Not a vision. Just clarity, sudden and total, like a room coming into focus. I am in treatment now. I am also more alive than I have been in fifteen years.