It’s a little like a first kiss. A plane ride to a new place. A taste of something exotically delicious. Jumping in to find the water is warmer than you thought. It’s a little like that, I think. Or maybe even a little bit better. It’s the last day before my last chemo treatment.

It was October of last year when I discovered the tumor. It was a few months of denial in Berlin, tasting the most delicious parts of a new life, plane rides to new places, with an inevitable return to find that the truth is unexpected. It has been 7 months of daily doctors, chemo, surgeries, sickness. It has been choice after hard choice from a short list of few options. It has been a gift and a curse and the beginning of something that never should have started in the first place.

Those of us who have made it this far all ask of each other, of our friends, our families, “So What Now?” It is perhaps the hardest question yet to be asked, because we have survived thus far, this particular lifeboat having actually made it to shore. A little worse for the wear, the worst supposedly behind us. Are we to wake up tomorrow and go back to the way things were? What do we do with this new perspective, when everything is different and normal isn’t normal, forever? I don’t know the answer yet, but things have a way of righting themselves, and if there is one thing I’ve come to understand, it is that it might take some time to figure out. I’ll take it.

So, tomorrow there is the last of the chemo. But tonight! Tonight there is bread pudding with the best of friends. And that means only one thing.
I picked the right boat.

Until Tomorrow,
~ Ali