No Good News

I haven't written on my blog in almost a month, because every time I log on I see the prevous posts about Sharon and I just plain lose heart. How can I write about interesting or good things happening in my life, or about whatever idea or question pops into my head, when my 47-year-old friend, who was completely healthy and in the prime of her life just two months ago, is lying in a hospital dying.

Sharon's first round of chemo didn't go well at all. She'd been in and out of the hospital with an infection, but they had already waited so long to start treatment that they decided to go ahead and try traditional chemo, instead of waiting to start a clinical trial at Georgetown. Within a few days she was back in the hospital, sicker than ever. They've now decided as a family not to continue treatment, to just focus on keeping her as comfortable as possible. She's not seeing any non-family visitors, which I can totally understand.

So this means I and everyone else who knows and loves her will very possibly never see her again. It's a shocking, incredible and much-too-fast turn of events, even for an illness we all knew was agressive and incurable. It's so terrible and tragic and impossible to understand and absorb.

And then when life goes on and I find myself laughing or enjoying a moment with friends, such as at Ginny's annual fitness party the other night, I realized how truly out of sync and abnormal and unacceptable this whole thing is. And yet we have no say -- it just IS. And my heart sinks, and I just get on with things, because no matter how anyone feels life simply won't stop for the rest of us. We have no choice but to carry on. And yet doing so feels unreal, and like a betrayal somehow. I know Sharon would never want anyone to feel this way, but what's happening -- as childish and whiny as it probably sounds -- is just so goddamed bloody unfair. It's just SO F$%&ING WRONG.