Thank You

   “In my day, something just was.  None of this analysis a hundred times over.  None of these college courses with people graduating in Whys and Hows and Becauses.  Sometimes, love, you just need to forget all of those words and enroll in a little lesson called ‘Thank You.’ ”

   Those words were taken from Thanks for the Memories, the novel I’m currently reading written by Cecelia Ahern.  An elderly father is speaking to his daughter.  And yet, I read his words and felt like he was talking to me.  

   I’m a planner, a list-maker, an organizer.  Daily to-do lists, weekly menus, gift lists.  And if there’s anything I’m learning from this year-and-a-half medical ordeal, it’s that I can’t plan everything.  It wasn’t me who planned a hospitalization, a biopsy, or tests checking for cancer.

   So, I surrender.  No more wondering why this is happening.  It just is.  And now we’ve got to diagnose it.  

   There are a lot of things in my life that feel unsettled, ill-at-ease, and I can’t figure out why.  Maybe I won’t know why until some time quite later.  I think of movies that have moved me, stories that resonate, and often the why’s aren’t evident for years after the fact.  I recently re-watched Music of the Heart, starring Meryl Streep.  On the night of her big concert, she acknowledges that if her husband hadn’t left her more than ten years ago, she wouldn’t be preparing to perform at Carnegie Hall with her violin students.  If her marriage hadn’t dissolved, Frances Mayes would not have traveled to Tuscany, bought and renovated a villa, and written a best-selling memoir (Under the Tuscan Sun).

   I don’t know why these things are happening.  Yet.  For now, they’re happening, and I’m trying to deal with them.  Some days, some moments of days, more successfully than others.

   All I know is that there are still plenty of good, plenty of wonderful, plenty of miraculous aspects in my life.  And to those, I do say “thank you.”