
“You get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right” (Robert Hunter)
I have just finished reading Mother, American Night and was struck by the humor, warmth and love laid bare by the author. So I had to pass along these words of wisdom to our breast cancer community: in this heartfelt autobiography J.P. Barlow opines “After Cynthia died I was forced to decide whether the universe was senseless and cruel or actually had a purpose...I realized the physical world exists so that love can make sense, because without the frame of fear and doubt and suffering, love is effortless and meaningless.”
Over the last few months it has been our great pleasure at survivingbreastcancer.org to be working with and hosting livestream webinars with Abigail Johnston and her many friends in the Metastatic Breast Cancer Community. Subject matters include palliative care, anticipatory grief, hospice, end of life, death doulas, and making talking about death less taboo. Abigail maintains that “to grieve means that you have loved”. Truer words may never have been spoken. Surely who doesn’t recall Tennyson’s proverb that “Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” where he is clearly elucidating on the theme that experiencing love in life is worth the pain of losing it.
Psychologists and philosophers have tangled with the notion that life was just a dream since and before the time of Descartes who wondered aloud whether the world we experience while awake might itself be a dream. Some point to the permanence of objects as the antithesis of this thought while scientists have a rebuttal argument that solid matter is actually made up of empty space.