Cancer

Cancer sure seems a big winner lately. It killed Cathy Seipp; now Elizabeth Edwards has it in her bones and Tony Snow, in his liver. Last week, the day Cathy Seipp died, M. sent a how-are-you text message to an old friend--an ex of sorts--and she replied that her dad had died of bone cancer that afternoon. M. called her that night, but she was too drunk and grief-stricken to talk.

The news was a bit of a shock to me, especially because I'd actually met the guy about a year and a half ago, back when he didn't have an inkling of his disease. He was a big, jovial, extremely likeable man who'd (barely) survived one or two Yugoslavian civil wars before getting his family out of there and safely to the US. Last fall, M.'s friend got into a terrible car accident and broke her neck. She was in a body cast for months. The very day she was released from the body cast and let out of the hospital, she learned her father was dying. That was four months ago.

I'm reminded that my mother was about this girl's age when she learned her dad was dying of lung cancer. She was in the US at the time, and he was in Mexico, and the cancer was so progressive she didn't have time to see him before he died.

Life can be so fucking depressing; it's no wonder people have religion.

Here are some pictures now. My next post, I hope, will be about puppies and rainbows.

No, I take that back--M.'s dad and stepmom are taking us to what is possibly the best restaurant in the United States later this week. So I think I'll write about that. Amazing food is even better than puppies and rainbows. And far, far better than cancer.