Last Thursday night my life shifted and changed, very suddenly, throwing it into a new perspective
A sudden health scare has made me reflect deeply on how there is just no sense trying to find patterns in the unfathomable mess of life. And maybe that's ok.
Last Thursday I was on the stairs in bare feet, sent down by one of the children, I don’t remember which one, to get a cup of water, when I put my hand on my chest, because I was cold - the heating hasn’t been working in our house - and what I felt there was the outline of a hard lump in my breast.
There were another three steps below me and by the time I’d reached the bottom, the brown wooden seemed slippery, my body suddenly airless, and I put my hand on the wall because I needed something to stop me falling over. One of the children shouted to me from upstairs about something, but I couldn’t answer because there was no breath in my lungs, no sound in my voice to answer them. I touched the lump again, and it felt hard, like a ball, pressing inside me against the soft flesh of my breast. I thought of the way my sister had called on the phone, I’ve found a lump in my breast, and I thought of the fact that four years later she had died.
For some time I’ve been thinking about the way life repeats itself, trying to find patterns which might help me trace some meaning over the unfathomable tracks of life. I’m fifty this year, and perhaps this is the thick, deep line in the sand that’s beckoning me to make sense of that which is essentially senseless, by which I mean life, and specifically fate. Who says why that thing happens to me and not to you? Who knows why you get that and I get this? Who decides why we choose that path yet you choose this one? Why did that person die young, and this one live to be old? Why you, but not me?