I.amN.otD.eadY.et children so listen up!

My mother’s health began to fail at the age of 80. I began to spend as much time as possible with my parents by stopping at their home in Jamestown while taking road trips for my job.

My brother lived in the same community and this gave us the opportunity to connect weekly, if not daily. Conversations, now more frequent, turned from ordinary news, weather and sports stuff to health.

“If you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything.”

“I bet Steve Jobs would have given up his millions to live a bit longer.”

“Mom and Dad should count their blessings. They both came from large families that experienced long lives. Nearly all of their siblings lived past 70 years. Many lived into their 90s”

Shortly after my dad passed in September of 2022, my parents’ story ended, and my cancer journey began. It would have been difficult to tell my parents about my disease. The timing was perfect.

With a lung cancer prognosis at this point in my life, I live in three-month “eras.” 

(On a side note, I always look up words before inserting them into uncommon uses. Era, as defined by the Oxford Dictionary, in its second definition, reads “a system of chronology dating from a particular noteworthy event.”)

How fitting is that? 

Cancer changes everything. Everybody.

These days I revel in every breath I take, remembering how difficult it was to function with a deep cough. Later, dealing with vertigo from the tumors in my brain. Over the past two years, it was also difficult to manage life with the fatigue from the radiation, chemo, and oral medication. 

Brain tumors are scarey. The neurosurgeon asks me to smile during office visits. He’s making sure my smile still works. I would be heartbroken if I couldn’t smile.

For some reason, those grateful tears are still near the surface and my eyes glisten when I hear of news about someone’s health.

In the morning darkness, watching the sky change color with the promise of the sunrise, I thank God for another day. I accept His healing even if it’s only for today. I’m running with it.

I’m better for it. At least I’m trying. Our Bible study leader mentioned something about how some days our foundations crack.

I replied with something I read and collected in my never-ending library of insightful thoughts for such a post as this.

“We are cracked, and that’s how the light gets in.”

You know whose light I’m talking about, right?

As always, I have humanly-humorous thoughts on aging coupled with this chronic disease. My brain functions a bit differently since chemo. The technical term is “chemo brain.”

Adding age to cancer has given me pause to reevaluate some of the lifelong rules in my home. So, like Bill Maher’s Real Time “New Rules,” I have a list.

Sue B’s New Rules

1. It’s okay to eat when you are hungry and not at 12 p.m. and 6 p.m. like in the rural hardworking family I grew up in.
2. Cleanliness, to a certain degree, is NOT next to Godliness. Time is better spent sitting with the creator in the still of each morning. PS: the Bible says nothing about this saying. My pastor’s wife told me it was a well-meaning minister that said this to his wife to give her something to do.
3. Never walk away from the stove while cooking. It’s too easy to become focused on a jigsaw puzzle and, well, you know what happens next. Things boil over or burn in the oven and then you have to do more cleaning.
4. Napping is okay. I try not to nap more than 30 minutes.
5. When there’s only two of you to feed, stop buying food in bulk from Sam’s Club.
6. It’s okay to throw out stale crackers from the super-sized boxes you bought at Sam’s Club a year ago.
7. If you are not working, stop buying more clothes you never have the opportunity to wear because you don’t go to work anymore.
8. When the elastic on your underwear doesn’t hold its shape, for crying out loud, turn it into a rag and wash your car.
9. Always check in with your children and grandchildren daily.
10. If you still have parents, call your mom (or dad) daily.
11. Enthusiastically compliment strangers, retail clerks, and especially your friends. Don’t hold back on praise.
12. Use your good dish towels.
13. Use your good china.
14. Serve dinner on paper plates when the dishwasher is full.
15. Soak up as much sun before winter as possible.
16. Stay away from mirrors. How you look is mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.
17. And, never, ever, ever, think that you can’t ask God for your simple needs in life. I’m told he has big shoulders.

As the overnight temperatures sink towards frosty mornings, the daylight hours fade, and Autumn officially begins, I am thinking about the approaching winter, both of them.

This is the winter of my life.

However my outward reflection betrays the youthfulness of my inner self I whisper, “I’m not old, I am eternal.”