“I feel like I got to do everything I wanted to do,” a friend said to me recently, after receiving a cancer diagnosis. “I don’t really have what you’d call unfinished business.” “Yeah, well, maybe you feel like your work is done,” I replied. “But I am nowhere near being finished with you.” This year, six of my close friends and relatives are dealing, variously, with cancer or Covid.
All six, thankfully, have good prognoses, and yet it has made them — and those of us in their immediate orbit — assess more carefully how we live and how we’ve lived.
Usually, I love this time of year. But in 2021 that joy is mixed up with sadness, too; December has a way of casting me adrift in time, remembering people who are gone.