Seen and Known

The sun visited us.

July 6.  I guess that’s not too late to begin summer.

When the sun comes out here, it’s time to read out on the patio, now that the evenings are warm, until late into the night. . .

From my reading stack today.

Irving Yalom in his Momma and the Meaning of Life tells the story of Paula, “Then she described the horrible days of her cancer’s recurrence.  That phase was her Calvary, she said, and the stations of the cross were the trials experienced by all patients with recurrence: radiotherapy rooms with doomsday metallic eyeballs suspended aloft, impersonal harried technicians,  uncomfortable friends, aloof doctors, and, most of all, the deafening hush of secrecy everywhere.  She cried when she told me about calling her surgeon, a friend of twenty years, only to be informed by his nurse that there were to be not further appointments because the doctor had nothing more to offer.  ‘What is wrong with doctors?  Why don’t they understand the importance of sheer presence?‘ she asked me. ‘Why can’t they realize that the very moment they have nothing else to offer is the moment they are most needed?’”

Natalie Goldberg’s The Great Failure, coming to terms with not just the vicissitudes of life, but the disappointment that comes with trusting and loving another human being.  And how easy it is to hope (or assume) that we will find love in that which is faultless.  She thinks about her own death and hopes that someone will have the courage to say, “She was also lonely, she suffered a lot.  She was mixed up.  She made some big mistakes.  But she was important to me.” Natalie notes, “I would feel really honored, as though someone had seen and known me.”

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die. George Bernard Shaw