Gray People
A few years ago, I learned that one of the women who taught at the Quaker school where I worked had a nasty breast cancer. The kind that didn't have a known cure. The kind that would go away and come back, like a bad penny. Janet was destined to have breast cancer for the rest of her life, however long that might be. I couldn't imagine. Oddly, not long after, another woman at the school -- different division, different subject area -- developed a different cancer. Different in many ways, but the same in one: there was no known cure for Rachel's disease. She, too, would be on chemotherapy for as long as it worked. Rachel and Jenny banded together and founded a support group for their peers (it turned out there were plenty of them) and a podcast series. No whining, no "why me," just "where do we go from here?" Still trying to wrap my head around the notion of a person's knowing what her cause of death was going to be, just not the when or the where, a...
