Heather:

When I was initially diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease I characterized it as an act of terror.  By doing that I abnegated any responsibility for my circumstance. I did nothing wrong—there was nothing I could do to have prevented the disease, it was like getting on a bus that just happened to have a bomb on it.  I did not feel weak.  I did not feel that I was to blame.  It was a random, utterly arbitrary occurrence that just happened to have victimized me.  It would not come back.

When it did come back, my sense of disease as terrorism intensified.  It became a manifestation of fear.  Cancer was the terrorist bomb that could explode within my body at any moment.  I became jittery and tentative—vigilant to anything out of the ordinary.  I lived in fear, and I lived quietly, unwilling to make commitments to people or things, I locked myself indoors for worry of the terrorist threat within my body.

I am trying to stop that.

As always,

Anderson

This whole thing, this trek through the land of illness, has the definitive feel of an ancient Greek Odyssey, and I’ve come to believe that I’m on a hero’s quest.

Quietly, at dawn, as I’m wheeled down through the subterranean tunnels that connect the university hospitals, the porters serve as my guides.

Their various languages flock overhead, the mysterious syllables disperse above me and it’s like they’re communicating a kind of weather instead of words. Descending into this unexplored dimension we pass creatures and topography as strange and wonderful as mythology, my porter/guides taking me on obscure missions where I must slay monsters, solve riddles and exhibit great feats of strength and determination in order to inch closer to my destiny, to my ultimate goal.

And somewhere past imagination, our son Jones pours through space. Laid bare to mystery, he carries messages and lessons from beyond. He hurtles through the firmament now, our meteor, cresting planets with a fierce, unstoppable purpose– he’s everywhere at once, multivalent. He’s assembling in slow wonder inside my wife, while I, caught in a terrestrial and mortal struggle, battle to be present, hurrying to be there to catch him, when like some sort of impossible star descending, he falls into our life.