This is Louise. She is not a client of mine, but she is one of my late mother’s very closest friends.
They were both diagnosed with cancer, my mom in 2008 and Louise a few years later in 2011. My mother made it about forty-five months. Louise, amazingly and beautifully, has stayed one step ahead of this thing for fifteen years. In these last few years, the fellowship of cancer that once belonged to my mother has, in a quiet and unexpected way, passed to me. Louise has now, ever so gracefully, and still radiating with effervescent joy, settled into home hospice care.
I have friends and comrades on a similar journey all over the world. But it is Louise with whom I most easily sit and talk. Over coffee we speak plainly about life and death, about relationships and regrets, about hope and fear, about how one ought to live, and how to adjust course when the horizon draws visibly closer. That ability to connect without pretense, to truly talk in the grounded presence of shared existential awe and understanding, is precious beyond description.
In a quieter but no less authentic way, I have similar conversations with people in later stages of life who work with me professionally. There is something powerful and humbling about helping someone shape the final chapters of their story, bringing the pieces together, while they know you are, at the same time, shaping your own.
I wish you a very happy New Year.