in sickness and in health I called Kaiser this morning, since I hadn't heard back from my doctor about the test she'd made last week, about whether the "abnormal" thing was just a blip in the lab or a smoking gun. The nurse, brightly, said it was "negative." Does that mean "low risk" or "high risk," I asked, stupidly. The doctor had told me, I thought, that the results would mean one or the other. "It's negative, so, 'no' risk." Moron, she didn't say. I didn't care. I just hung up the phone with a shaky, glad hand. That letter had hooked into a bunch of deep old fears, and not only because I'm an alarmist and hypochondriachal, but also because there's a lot of heavy sickness in my world just now. A lot, and I'm not even speaking metaphorically. My mother has been diagnosed with emphysema. Which, I learned, is what my friend in Santa Clara has had all along. An old friend from high school has stomach cancer, and my cousin is battling the effects of AIDS and advanced heart disease at the same time. In Australia, my young friend's lung collapsed. In Austin, the wife of my old boyfriend was diagnosed with breast cancer last month. She's seven months pregnant and has a five-year-old son. Last week, a friend's mother died unexpectedly, on the eve of her wedding and months before the birth of a grandchild. What the hell am I supposed to do with all this? Like any normal person, I hate hospitals, and sickness and death. I like to think that those are all "abnormal" and that normal is hale and hearty and "no risk." But I'm getting a glimpse today of the pounding normality of the abnormal. And I'm remembering how the wisest among us know that sickness and death is part of the deal. I've read that His Holiness visualizes his own death and disintegration every day, a physical meditation on the constant truth of change and suffering. Always, I want to fight or flee. Today I want to have the guts to look suffering in the eye for even a moment, and to feel the terrible, profound liberation of facing the Wall of Change. Sickness. Suffering. Death.

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