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Unexpected Clarity From a Life Upended

癌症
人际关系
生命
The doctor said that untreated, I could be ‎ in months.
It began when my phone ‎ while we were in the ‎ at the American Museum of Natural History. My 5-year-old was ‎ us with the fact that it would take 70 friends standing hand to hand to make a ‎ ‎ the life-size blue whale hanging from the ceiling.
I had been ‎ the call. ‎ broken ribs, ‎ ‎ ‎ and some ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ that something was wrong. Still, it felt ‎ to be told I had an incurable ‎ ‎, one that I would later find out had ‎ felled my hero, the ‎ Norm Macdonald. I felt a youthful 47, walking four miles every morning in the park and always taking the ‎ to my eighth-floor ‎. The ‎ from the film “50/50” came to ‎ where, upon being told he had ‎, a young man responds ‎, “That doesn’t make any ‎, though. I don’t smoke. I don’t drink. I recycle.”
The warm older doctor told me that this was not her ‎ of ‎, so she would transfer me to another ‎ in her hospital.
The ‎ was ‎ ‎ by ‎ of kids. She ‎ told me it was not curable but was treatable and she hoped I would have many years left and, by the way, I was lucky not to have the ‎ in her specialty, since those ‎ tended to die quickly and painfully. Somehow this did not ‎ me.
“Please don’t drop me,” I ‎. She told me my new doctor would be calling me ‎ an hour and wished me ‎. I ‎ the late afternoon chaos of the museum and sat on a shady ‎ on that early ‎ day surrounded by Upper West Side ‎.
It was 42 minutes before my phone ‎ again. My ‎ of questions for the new doctor had ‎ from “How ‎ do I have left?” to “Can I still drink soda water?” But the call ‎ out to be just his ‎ secretary asking if I was free on Friday of the ‎ week (10 days away) for a ‎. I ‎ that this all ‎ rather more ‎. She ‎ that in the ‎ I could talk to my ‎ ‎ ‎ — the same guy who had ‎ many ‎ red flags over the past ‎ of years and who was now on my never-talk-to-again ‎ of one.
And then there was no one on the line.
In “Anna Karenina,” when Levin’s brother Nikolai is dying in ‎ ‎, Levin is so physically and psychologically repulsed that he ‎ the ‎ and dreads the ‎ ‎ it brings. By ‎, Levin’s young wife, Kitty, views Nikolai with ‎ and ‎ for him with tenderness and ‎. Her ‎ acceptance allows her to ‎ the grimness of ‎ with grace.
I have generally been private about my ‎, my time as a ‎ just ‎ that reflex. I ‎ my ‎ self believed the world to be full of Levins. But I needed a doctor, so I stayed on that bench and contacted everyone I could think of who might help me find the right one — friends, some folks I hadn’t spoken to in years, ex-colleagues, a high school girlfriend, a former potential subject for a ‎ and so on.
Within hours, ‎ friends of friends were sending emails on my behalf to ‎ across the country. In the end, a doctor saw me and delivered my ‎: With ‎, I might just make it to a ‎, maybe 10 years away. But ‎, it was not just a doctor I was ‎ for but something more important.
Since that day, so many people have shown up as Kittys rather than the Levins I had ‎. ‎ ‎ by a bus instead, I would have not only ‎ seeing people at their best but also been robbed of the ‎ to feel this ‎ — as ‎ as it sounds — for having been allowed this ‎ in the first ‎.
A few days after ‎ I had ‎, a dear friend of mine with his own health problems ‎ from hours away to show up at our door lugging two huge bags ‎ from his favorite ‎ restaurant. “When a friend is in ‎, you ‎,” he said. I was ‎ of when Lou Gehrig, ‎ a ‎ ‎, called himself “the luckiest man on the ‎ of the earth.”
I am not writing here to ‎ advice to you, dear ‎, but I do ‎ your ‎. Knowing that you are an ‎ of many rather than a few is a strong ‎ to organize my ‎ and, now, to leave this as a ‎ for my boy.
Before my ‎, if I was going to give him one bit of advice, it would have been, “Never ‎ an ‎ to be generous; they are ‎ than you think.” I wish I had lived that more. But today I’d like to ‎ a ‎, “Don’t be afraid to allow others those ‎, too.”
Maybe it’s the ‎ talking, but what has ‎ ‎ to me is that without intimate human ‎, however fleeting, we are ‎. Everything else ‎ so small ‎. It feels like something I had always known — perhaps something that deep down we all know — but then real life made me forget.
And ‎ all this, real life has had the ‎ to keep on doing what it does. Before ‎ split my world into Kittys and Levins, there had always been a few ‎ old jerks to ‎ with, and ‎, they didn’t go away. I’ll ‎ those human ‎.
But ‎, and in those ‎ moments when we truly hear it, life’s complexities can fade, leaving behind a striking clarity.
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Unexpected Clarity From a Life Upended | Leximory