Waiting...

This past week I spent a lot of time waiting. Waiting for airplanes to arrive and depart, waiting for luggage, waiting to sleep, waiting to wake. But mostly, I spent a lot of time waiting in a reception room with a vaulted glass atrium ceiling and a fountain surrounded by pots of tropical plants. The magazines were all old and scattered about small tables like the ochre and rusty leaves that crunch under our shoes when we cross the yard. The people sitting in this room all looked old, too. And scared.

I've never spent much time sitting in a waiting room with cancer patients. I was an intruder there, the healthy, the well one, sufficiently detached from their individual hells. After several days, I got to 'know' these patients: the biker-looking dude with his tee sleeves rolled up, speaking through a tracheotomy; the wrinkled black woman, silver hair in a tidy, dignified chignon, wobbling on the arm of a nurse; the slight woman, my age with neatly-pressed khakis and a red cardigan who seemed so self-contained most mornings but on the last day wept quietly while speaking with her doctor; the dark-haired man with intense blue eyes who came out from behind the radiation treatment doors on the second day and shook his head at his wife sitting, his back shuddering in little spasms. And of course, my father, acting friendly, informed, strong. Confident, for me maybe, or for himself. And if you looked closely at me, at my eyes, maybe you'd see fear there, too.

I think of these people, I wonder and worry and pray for them.

And so I wait... 20 days done, 12 more to go. Peace, Linda