Updates

Stuff I told you about here has changed. Well, some of it has. Molly Ivins remains dead, as do my uncle and neighbor. At least death is permanent. Or is it?

My best friend's suspicious "masses" of the breast and armpit turned out to be calcification or something -- at any rate, nothing to worry about. She has to go back in a year for another mammogram and that's it.

Her mom is doing incredibly well, despite dementia and the resulting confusion. She thinks she's in elementary school, evidently. Crazy thing is, she's a lot happier (friend: "She LOVED school!") and is even participating in group activities at the nursing home, which she never did in the assisted living facility where she used to live. Happiness is good, even if it's based on faulty thinking. Isn't it?

Friend's cat with kidney failure has rallied and is now eating, playing with the other cat in the house and walking around with his tail in the air. We've recently heard of cats living a year or more after this diagnosis. Hope has been restored (at least temporarily).

Over the weekend I attended a class. On Sunday we were asked to participate in an exercise about impermance and our tendency to avoid the difficult feelings associated with impermanence: Each of us was invited to sit in a chair facing the group of 30 or so and state our name and our parents' names and then announce out loud that we will die. As in, "I am Sarah, my father was Bill and my mother is Martha. I will die." It was a profound and moving experience and one I'll be thinking about for a long, long time.