An optimist stays up until midnight to see the New Year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.

~ Bill Vaughn

I always get flustered as each year turns. This year is no different, and may even possibly be worse than normal. 2011 was certainly interesting around the old Bloggybirdery. Many plusses, lots of stay-the-courses, and certainly one last-minute event that could be looked upon from either an optimistic or pessimistic viewpoint, depending on the moment and the angle of shadows or light across the day.

Dan is recovering from lung surgery. Slowly.

I’m relieved. Joyously.

While you are all—perhaps—wildly making New Year Resolutions, may I offer this thought? Instead of worrying over lists of things to improve upon, I’ve decided to locate one word to incorporate to define how I’ll view the the coming year.

I offer that finding your word for the coming year is well more fun than making lists of deprivation and strident improvement.

Here’s my word for 2012: Certainty!

According to Voltaire, “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.”

I don’t mean to contradict the likes of Voltaire, but still … Au contraire!

With certainty, I welcome the New Year, with its promise of more turns and twists than a Hitchcock mystery—how fun is that? With certainty, I give myself over to the Joy! of another year with all its promise of  new adventure and blissful life.

I like my word. I placed my new word over my desk. It’s my Word!

If you were to have a word, what would yours be?

In response to a blog request from my dear friend and extraordinary poet, Drew Myron, here is my very small offering located in her comments section :

What do you want? My Dan asks.

An Answer, I say, or at least another Aperitif.

Bananas for your Blood

Count, maybe. I’ll take that.

See? I’m Dusting things

For your lungs to breathe Easy.

Your Energy is low, I notice.

Frightened? Yes.

I’m still Gathering Hints Into Jewels

Of why this happened.

Ka-ka-ka,

Cancer? Lung cancer?

Not even Maybe.

Not possible. Non smokers.

Not. Not. Not.

Oh, Oh, okay, Perhaps that one year

In your mid-teens, when

Performance equaled Quality,

And Risk equaled Sexiness.

Turn to now. Unwind. Unwind.

One small year inhaled.

Vexed? Of course, there’s no answer all these years later.

Why? Don’t ask, don’t Wonder.

X-Rays will say all gone, and

You will keep on, and you will become old.

Why? We will never know.

But, when we are old, and if I go first,

I promise to greet you,

In niche 22 at St. Mary’s Cemetery, next to

The statue of St. Francis of Xavier.

That is, of course, if I leave

This Zenith first. If you are first, however …

All bets are off.

Maybe life seems hard because we assume it should be easy. We fashion ideas of how things should be and we pin those ideas to our hearts as if they belong to us. They don’t, really.

What we do have is the morning, with its promise that something magical might happen that day. Actually attaining some sort of wonderful day doesn’t really matter—it’s the promise that helps us practice our daily measure of hopefulness.

Things are decided in the morning.

Take this morning’s coffee, for instance. My cup was full, steaming with a good measure of chocolate and creamer to make it extra yummy. Dan sat across the table enjoying his own coffee. His was black. We chatted about the news, laughed over a YouTube video, poured a second cup of coffee. Birds chirped and danced about on the patio. The dogs snoozed. Everything was sweet and delicious, just like my coffee.

Then in a blink, it struck me that for all those long minutes I had forgotten about the mass of cancer that squats on the floor of Dan’s left lung.

In two days, Dan will receive a lobectomy, and that nasty spot of cancer will be removed. I expect his surgery to be followed by many years of more delicious magic spent over cups of coffee and morning sun coming through the window. For all the other notions that may have flitted through my head this morning, the understanding that each day holds a promise that is unique to any other day, was the highest and most important thought.

Like a fingerprint…or a snowflake…each day is its own.

And that’s what was decided this morning!

My best to you all as your own day unfolds with its promises and magic…and maybe an extra cup of coffee to linger over. Whatever it is for you, I hope you’ll find the loveliness of your day. I know Dan and I found ours.

For two days I’ve been trying to hook words together like a train, one car after another. It’s not working. I’ve tried to be clever, to be funny. I’ve tried sincerity, intellectualism, and stoicism. I’ve tried to be smart, or dumb, or whatever it took to be articulate. Nothing has worked. I have no cutsey pictures to precede this post.

So, maybe I’ll just tell the truth.

The truth is, I’m still scared.

Every lung test has shown that My Dan is in Stage I lung cancer, the best of all possibilities. We’re non-smokers. This should be easy.

Yet, I’m still scared.

The thought that My Dan has been invaded once more by cancer is not acceptable. Not acceptable, in the least. Still, the news is good. Every test so far indicates that this one (just like his prostate cancer) was caught incidental and before any spread. So far, we’re operating on a Stage I lung cancer, get-that-lobe-out scenario.

We expect surgery sometime next week or the week after. As far as I’m concerned, it’s going to be a very good Holiday. We’ve already put up the Christmas tree and I’m looking for a menorah to cover all the bases. I know, I’m silly.

Still, the truth really is…I’m scared. On the day of Dan’s surgery, I’ll sit alone, in a hard, straight-backed chair, waiting for good news. But this isn’t about me or my discomfort. This is about My Dan, and the whole thing for him really sucks. Can I say that? Yeah. It sucks.

Our bodies—filled with mystery, steeped in misunderstanding—are often all we have. Sometimes our bodies are through with us in a very short time, sometimes it seems we stick around longer than Gandalf’s beard. If we have the opportunity to reach our middle years, we discover our bodies in very new ways. We learn they creak and groan and click most annoyingly.

Sometimes our bodies must be taken apart and reassembled with less jigsaw pieces than we started with.

That’s where we are right now.

Slightly over two weeks ago, My Dan had some simple tests to see if there might be a connection between his ridiculously high blood pressure and his kidney arteries. Everything is well on that front. However, incidental to the testing, a 2.8 cm lung mass was discovered.

We sure know how to stir things up around the old Bloggybirdery.

My Dan was immediately referred for specific testing and was soon diagnosed with non-small cell lung cancer. I need to repeat that: Lung Cancer! His specific type of lung cancer is called adenocarcinoma. We’re both non-smokers, so the news was immediately stunning. Once the word cancer is introduced, nothing else matters. Creaking and groaning and clicking cease to be bothersome. There is a cancer…in the body of My Dan and I want it out!

We’re lucky it was caught incidental to a test for something else. He has NO symptoms—we wouldn’t have known otherwise, until it was too late. So very lucky.

Lung Cancer is the leading cause of cancer death, outpacing breast, prostate and colon cancers combined. It’s a big deal. If you want to learn more about lung cancer, go here. They’ll tell you the truth.

My Dan is on the fast track. He sees a cardiothoracic surgeon on Thursday and will have surgery within the next several days. They don’t seem to mess around with lung cancer. Nevertheless, we’re encouraged that this was caught early and have every reason to believe that My Dan will be on the plus side of possible outcomes.

In the meantime, we’re going to learn to embrace our groaning, creaking, clicking bodies.

Thank you all for your support. We’re not proud—we’ll take whatever you’re able to give. Prayers. Good thoughts. Soup. Just know you are very loved by us and we thank you for your understanding as we maneuver through the ins-and-outs of the surprise of lung cancer.

Yes, our bodies are …..

There are forms and levels of caregiving. Taking care of my sister, started out with now-and-then and has now progressed to once-a-week, sometimes twice, you’ll-be-here-won’t-you days of errands and lunches and carrying load-after-load of groceries up her narrow stairs and into her small apartment.

She’s always grateful.

Taking care of the doggies involves a whole different set of daily duties. Feeding, brushing, snuggles on the couch, cookies. Oh, yeah—Copious Cookies!

With animals, there’s not so much gratitude as there is symbiosis. The fur of our pets is magical—I give cookies in exchange for their keeping my blood pressure in check, smiles on my face. They are the gatekeepers to my good nature. For any menopausal, will-someone-please-turn-down-the-heat,woman, doggies and kitties are the best medicine ever.

Then there is My Dan—he doesn’t need much these days. Mornings on the golf course, luxurious and long afternoon naps. A hand offered. The best Homemade Soup in the world, right here in our kitchen (I should franchise my soup—really, it’s the best).

Then, there is me. I don’t yet know about me. Maybe we should each ponder about ourselves and what we need, or don’t need. Perhaps we might think about how we hold hands, and give and receive…and give, and receive.

And give. And receive.

Please tell me about you. How do you give? How do you receive? Today, I honestly NEED to know.

“Everything just seems so dark,” my friend said through gulping tears. “My mom’s mind is just gone, no memories. Nothing. She doesn’t even know me anymore. Everything is just dark for her. For me.”

I wanted so much to respond with something lovely, something provocative. Something at least halfway helpful. I couldn’t. I just held her hand for a long while and let her cry. Then I went home to ponder, wonder about what I might have said to soothe my friend. I looked around to see if the leaves have started to turn yet after our cooler nights. Even that was a disaster.

In the end, I decided darkness isn’t all that bad. Of course, I can’t say that to my friend who is grieving, suffering the slow, protracted loss of her mother. I know what she’s feeling and there’s not much I can say to help.

But still, darkness can be seen as not all bad. After all, a darkened room is pretty good for sleeping. We can only see the night stars when everything around us is dark. Dark is supposedly as good as light because—as the story goes—each was created in equal value before being separated. I think we’re completely dark inside, and that dark is obviously good. Our brains and hearts and internal parts all work in secret beneath the covering of our skin, deep inside the pitch dark of our bodies. Even when we open our mouths to laugh or yawn or to tell our truths to each other, the light that passes through our bodies touches only our teeth and tongues. Our nostrils only go so far up. Beyond our eyes, it is very, very dark in there.

As we get older, we form wrinkles and fissures of light and dark. We drop our immaturity and find our bearings as grownups. We notice more how shadows move across the course of each day. We see fallacy in the notion that something is either all dark or all light, all good or all bad. We find nuance. We see shades of gray, and suddenly we find out that things we thought were yucky have a new flavor. Broccoli isn’t so bad after all.

For those of us who must watch a brilliant person fade into Alzheimer’s disease, it’s natural that we would call it all darkness and curse it forever. But I’ve watched my friend’s mother continue to have imaginative thought—even if it is steeped in a dark brew of forgetfulness and unreality.

I suppose I could say to my friend that, even though her mother has drastically changed, she is still filled with the color of love. A daughter’s greatest challenge will always be to allow her mother to be different, to no longer know her name, to forget their history. In other words, to be…dark.

Some things are just meant to play with. I’ve taken the first lines of my story, All the Dancing Birds, plugged them into tagxedo.com, and Voila! I have made WORD BIRD! Thanks go out to my friend, Merrie Destefano, who perfectly explains the art of word-clouding and how fun and creative those nice folks are at tagxedo. They’ll even take your word image and imprint it onto items like t-shirts or bags or coffee cups.

I could play there all day!

But, it’s time to return to our regularly-scheduled programming, and the highly serious business of writing more potentially lovely word clouds.

During a final conversation I had with a friend who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease—not long before his speech center went dark like a burned-out light bulb, and his ability to form words along with it—I learned some surprising things. He shared with me his hope for a destination better than Alzheimer’s, and that he looked forward to intersecting with whatever place he might be taken after he died. He talked some about heaven, but said he might purposefully avoid it if he had to continue being forgetful. He said he’d rather be nothing than to continue remaking himself every day into something less than he’d been the day before. He had been the CEO of a large corporation; that day he’d forgotten how to use a spoon to eat the ice cream I’d brought over.

The sadness around his eyes said everything.

Then, an amazing conversation of whimsy took over and my friend transported me into his mind. He talked about the elevator in his house (it was a single story house, there was no elevator). He gushed on about how he rode it up and down to all his favorite places. The first floor, he said, was where he danced with ladies. He loved his ladies. The second floor gave out chocolate and beer, and sometimes shots of whiskey. He grinned and winked at me. On the third floor, he said there were clothes that didn’t have zippers or buttons; he liked that floor because clothing flummoxed him now, especially which was front and which was back, which was wrongside and which was right. Then he took in a deep breath. The top floor, he said, his words carefully measured, opened onto a garden filled with sunflowers (his favorite plant) and broccoli (his least favorite food). He said he liked the top floor best because it was like yin and yang, good and bad, special and horrible.

He said the top floor was like Alzheimer’s disease, with its own good and bad, its own brand of special and horrible.

Today marks the start of National Alzheimer’s Disease Awareness Month. My friend helped me find the deliberation and imagination that occurs for Alzheimer’s patients…even when there are no more words.

On Saturday, I shall join several hundred other folks to walk in my friend’s memory, along with the memories of my Dan’s parents and my father.

To learn more, contact the National Alzheimer’s Association. And then, if you can, give, walk, love. I’ll be there — come and join me if you can.

Sometimes we get lucky. We live long lives with few interruptions. Maybe, a skinned knee or a mild flu now and then. Maybe some osteoarthritis that wicks its way up from your toes to the tips of your fingers—nothing serious nor very painful.

Sometimes.

Then, there are those moments that intersect with life like some crazy tornado that rips our roof away and exposes us to our fragility. Our humanity. Those are the heart events, the strokes, the broken hips—Alzheimer’s disease. We do our best to avoid those tornadic occurrences that leave us broken and helpless. We exercise, eat our broccoli, hold our tongue to the side of our mouths as we work out the Sunday crossword puzzle. We drink our red wine. We watch our weight.

But for those among us who develop Alzheimer’s disease, there seems to be no rhyme nor reason. There is no preventative. Most sadly, there is yet no cure.

September is World Alzheimer’s Awareness Month. As of 2010, there are an estimated 35.6 million people with dementia worldwide. By 2050, it is projected that this figure will have increased to over 115 million. Much of the increase will be in developing countries. Already 58% of people with dementia live in developing countries, but by 2050 this will rise to 71%. The fastest growth in the elderly population is taking place in China, India, and their south Asian and western Pacific neighbors.

America isn’t immune. An estimated 5.3 million Americans of all ages have Alzheimer’s disease (2010). This figure includes 5.1 million people aged 65 and older and 200,000 individuals under age 65 who have younger-onset Alzheimer’s. In Texas alone, there are currently, 340,000 people living with Alzheimer’s disease. By 2025, that number is expected to rise to 470,000. The Alzheimer’s Association estimates that there are 500,000 Americans younger than 65 with Alzheimer’s and other dementias. Of these, approximately 40 percent are estimated to have Alzheimer’s.

So, come and join me. Come walk with me. I’ll be walking to end Alzheimer’s on November 5^th in Phoenix, Arizona. Lace up your shoes and come with me. Give. Generously. If you don’t know someone yet with Alzheimer’s, the sad news is that you will.

We need a cure—and you’re the hope.