For two days I’ve been trying to hook words together like a train, one car after another. It’s not working. I’ve tried to be clever, to be funny. I’ve tried sincerity, intellectualism, and stoicism. I’ve tried to be smart, or dumb, or whatever it took to be articulate. Nothing has worked. I have no cutsey pictures to precede this post.

So, maybe I’ll just tell the truth.

The truth is, I’m still scared.

Every lung test has shown that My Dan is in Stage I lung cancer, the best of all possibilities. We’re non-smokers. This should be easy.

Yet, I’m still scared.

The thought that My Dan has been invaded once more by cancer is not acceptable. Not acceptable, in the least. Still, the news is good. Every test so far indicates that this one (just like his prostate cancer) was caught incidental and before any spread. So far, we’re operating on a Stage I lung cancer, get-that-lobe-out scenario.

We expect surgery sometime next week or the week after. As far as I’m concerned, it’s going to be a very good Holiday. We’ve already put up the Christmas tree and I’m looking for a menorah to cover all the bases. I know, I’m silly.

Still, the truth really is…I’m scared. On the day of Dan’s surgery, I’ll sit alone, in a hard, straight-backed chair, waiting for good news. But this isn’t about me or my discomfort. This is about My Dan, and the whole thing for him really sucks. Can I say that? Yeah. It sucks.

Our bodies—filled with mystery, steeped in misunderstanding—are often all we have. Sometimes our bodies are through with us in a very short time, sometimes it seems we stick around longer than Gandalf’s beard. If we have the opportunity to reach our middle years, we discover our bodies in very new ways. We learn they creak and groan and click most annoyingly.

Sometimes our bodies must be taken apart and reassembled with less jigsaw pieces than we started with.

That’s where we are right now.

Slightly over two weeks ago, My Dan had some simple tests to see if there might be a connection between his ridiculously high blood pressure and his kidney arteries. Everything is well on that front. However, incidental to the testing, a 2.8 cm lung mass was discovered.

We sure know how to stir things up around the old Bloggybirdery.

My Dan was immediately referred for specific testing and was soon diagnosed with non-small cell lung cancer. I need to repeat that: Lung Cancer! His specific type of lung cancer is called adenocarcinoma. We’re both non-smokers, so the news was immediately stunning. Once the word cancer is introduced, nothing else matters. Creaking and groaning and clicking cease to be bothersome. There is a cancer…in the body of My Dan and I want it out!

We’re lucky it was caught incidental to a test for something else. He has NO symptoms—we wouldn’t have known otherwise, until it was too late. So very lucky.

Lung Cancer is the leading cause of cancer death, outpacing breast, prostate and colon cancers combined. It’s a big deal. If you want to learn more about lung cancer, go here. They’ll tell you the truth.

My Dan is on the fast track. He sees a cardiothoracic surgeon on Thursday and will have surgery within the next several days. They don’t seem to mess around with lung cancer. Nevertheless, we’re encouraged that this was caught early and have every reason to believe that My Dan will be on the plus side of possible outcomes.

In the meantime, we’re going to learn to embrace our groaning, creaking, clicking bodies.

Thank you all for your support. We’re not proud—we’ll take whatever you’re able to give. Prayers. Good thoughts. Soup. Just know you are very loved by us and we thank you for your understanding as we maneuver through the ins-and-outs of the surprise of lung cancer.

Yes, our bodies are …..

There are forms and levels of caregiving. Taking care of my sister, started out with now-and-then and has now progressed to once-a-week, sometimes twice, you’ll-be-here-won’t-you days of errands and lunches and carrying load-after-load of groceries up her narrow stairs and into her small apartment.

She’s always grateful.

Taking care of the doggies involves a whole different set of daily duties. Feeding, brushing, snuggles on the couch, cookies. Oh, yeah—Copious Cookies!

With animals, there’s not so much gratitude as there is symbiosis. The fur of our pets is magical—I give cookies in exchange for their keeping my blood pressure in check, smiles on my face. They are the gatekeepers to my good nature. For any menopausal, will-someone-please-turn-down-the-heat,woman, doggies and kitties are the best medicine ever.

Then there is My Dan—he doesn’t need much these days. Mornings on the golf course, luxurious and long afternoon naps. A hand offered. The best Homemade Soup in the world, right here in our kitchen (I should franchise my soup—really, it’s the best).

Then, there is me. I don’t yet know about me. Maybe we should each ponder about ourselves and what we need, or don’t need. Perhaps we might think about how we hold hands, and give and receive…and give, and receive.

And give. And receive.

Please tell me about you. How do you give? How do you receive? Today, I honestly NEED to know.

“Everything just seems so dark,” my friend said through gulping tears. “My mom’s mind is just gone, no memories. Nothing. She doesn’t even know me anymore. Everything is just dark for her. For me.”

I wanted so much to respond with something lovely, something provocative. Something at least halfway helpful. I couldn’t. I just held her hand for a long while and let her cry. Then I went home to ponder, wonder about what I might have said to soothe my friend. I looked around to see if the leaves have started to turn yet after our cooler nights. Even that was a disaster.

In the end, I decided darkness isn’t all that bad. Of course, I can’t say that to my friend who is grieving, suffering the slow, protracted loss of her mother. I know what she’s feeling and there’s not much I can say to help.

But still, darkness can be seen as not all bad. After all, a darkened room is pretty good for sleeping. We can only see the night stars when everything around us is dark. Dark is supposedly as good as light because—as the story goes—each was created in equal value before being separated. I think we’re completely dark inside, and that dark is obviously good. Our brains and hearts and internal parts all work in secret beneath the covering of our skin, deep inside the pitch dark of our bodies. Even when we open our mouths to laugh or yawn or to tell our truths to each other, the light that passes through our bodies touches only our teeth and tongues. Our nostrils only go so far up. Beyond our eyes, it is very, very dark in there.

As we get older, we form wrinkles and fissures of light and dark. We drop our immaturity and find our bearings as grownups. We notice more how shadows move across the course of each day. We see fallacy in the notion that something is either all dark or all light, all good or all bad. We find nuance. We see shades of gray, and suddenly we find out that things we thought were yucky have a new flavor. Broccoli isn’t so bad after all.

For those of us who must watch a brilliant person fade into Alzheimer’s disease, it’s natural that we would call it all darkness and curse it forever. But I’ve watched my friend’s mother continue to have imaginative thought—even if it is steeped in a dark brew of forgetfulness and unreality.

I suppose I could say to my friend that, even though her mother has drastically changed, she is still filled with the color of love. A daughter’s greatest challenge will always be to allow her mother to be different, to no longer know her name, to forget their history. In other words, to be…dark.

Some things are just meant to play with. I’ve taken the first lines of my story, All the Dancing Birds, plugged them into tagxedo.com, and Voila! I have made WORD BIRD! Thanks go out to my friend, Merrie Destefano, who perfectly explains the art of word-clouding and how fun and creative those nice folks are at tagxedo. They’ll even take your word image and imprint it onto items like t-shirts or bags or coffee cups.

I could play there all day!

But, it’s time to return to our regularly-scheduled programming, and the highly serious business of writing more potentially lovely word clouds.

During a final conversation I had with a friend who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease—not long before his speech center went dark like a burned-out light bulb, and his ability to form words along with it—I learned some surprising things. He shared with me his hope for a destination better than Alzheimer’s, and that he looked forward to intersecting with whatever place he might be taken after he died. He talked some about heaven, but said he might purposefully avoid it if he had to continue being forgetful. He said he’d rather be nothing than to continue remaking himself every day into something less than he’d been the day before. He had been the CEO of a large corporation; that day he’d forgotten how to use a spoon to eat the ice cream I’d brought over.

The sadness around his eyes said everything.

Then, an amazing conversation of whimsy took over and my friend transported me into his mind. He talked about the elevator in his house (it was a single story house, there was no elevator). He gushed on about how he rode it up and down to all his favorite places. The first floor, he said, was where he danced with ladies. He loved his ladies. The second floor gave out chocolate and beer, and sometimes shots of whiskey. He grinned and winked at me. On the third floor, he said there were clothes that didn’t have zippers or buttons; he liked that floor because clothing flummoxed him now, especially which was front and which was back, which was wrongside and which was right. Then he took in a deep breath. The top floor, he said, his words carefully measured, opened onto a garden filled with sunflowers (his favorite plant) and broccoli (his least favorite food). He said he liked the top floor best because it was like yin and yang, good and bad, special and horrible.

He said the top floor was like Alzheimer’s disease, with its own good and bad, its own brand of special and horrible.

Today marks the start of National Alzheimer’s Disease Awareness Month. My friend helped me find the deliberation and imagination that occurs for Alzheimer’s patients…even when there are no more words.

On Saturday, I shall join several hundred other folks to walk in my friend’s memory, along with the memories of my Dan’s parents and my father.

To learn more, contact the National Alzheimer’s Association. And then, if you can, give, walk, love. I’ll be there — come and join me if you can.