Bad News

We all know on some level that our lives can take a turn at any given moment, that in the space between two heartbeats everything can change, for better or for worse. How many of us are really aware, though, of that exact moment when everything you trust goes flying on the wind and a whole new reality comes in to fill the void?

Some of these moments come to us in slow motion, when you go into the bathroom and open the box, sit on the toilet and pee on the little cardboard strip, waiting to see if it turns pink or not. You sit down on the couch after dinner to watch the days lottery numbers come up, your heart beating a little faster with each number that comes up and matching your ticket, until finally you see that all of the digits match and your voice is stuck on oh my god for the next three minutes.

Other times the moment comes and goes and you don’t even realize it. You are introduced to the person who you will love for the rest of your days, and you are busy thinking about the how you are going to finish the project you are working on by the deadline your boss has given you. You look into his eyes and fail to see your children looking back at you, or the devotion he will show when you begin to forget how to find your way home from the grocery.

Then there are those moments when you know immediately that life has taken a turn. You day is going along in the same routine manner that it has every day for years, when some piece of hard reality comes at you in a phone call or a knock on the door. There can be no question that all you know to be true has been turned upside down and there is no going back. Try as you will to rearrange the pattern of days making the pieces fall just enough to the left so that the resulting picture will be more to your liking, it all comes back to cold reality. The bottom fell out of my world on a warm July afternoon in 2011. As I was about ready to leave my office for the day, my cell phone rang. It was one of my daughters, telling me that she was in the emergency room at the local hospital. I could hear the panic in her voice as she said "Mom, there is a mass in one of my lungs".