It's finally almost time

for summer to be over and George to start kindergarden and also my radiation to be over at nearly the same time; just 12 treatments left for me. The anticipation for both of these changes is dissipating....on the Tuesday after Labor Day George will go to his new school and though I am still full of bittersweet feelings, it is going to happen and I feel ready for it. New rhythms will be created in our lives, walking him to school and getting to know his new teacher to start with, and we'll each, George and I, have to reconfigure the dance of our relationship.

And this end of my formal treatment, I am really ready for that, too; I feel like I'm done with it now, frankly, even though I still have my morning ritual of running out the door at 7:20AM with my coffee mug in hand to head to Fox Chase.

I'm done in that I can sense the ways that I've changed in the last six months; I can feel what it is to have come out of being a thirty-seven-year old woman, mother of two young children, diagnosed with breast cancer. I can feel what it means to survive. I can tell you that the smells and tastes of summer

really have been much sweeter and deeper. I can tell you that I forgive others and myself much more easily. I can tell you that I decluttered my office at work, throwing out papers I had held onto for six years but had never looked it because I could say to myself

I really don't need this.

I can tell you that I feel like my soul has landed more completely in my body and I can tell you that may not have happened just now if I hadn't brushed so closely against my own death--

by that I mean

looked it in the face.

And by looking at my death in the face I mean being scared shitless
and also kind of not being scared shitless, kind of being okay.

And being okay,knowing that I am really here, now, present,
alive, surviving, resilient, courageous, vulnerable, forgiving

that is what I mean by smells are sharper and sounds are clearer and cares are less.

It's finally almost here when my regular cancer treatment at Fox Chase will be over
and I can go back to being

a mom like the other moms taking their children to kindergarden and preschool

and I know too
that what I am feeling now

the intense, vivid, sensual appreciation of the world inside and around me
may dull and fade in time

and that that will be okay.