“I am perhaps the most fortunate person alive,” I thought to myself this morning as I took an early morning walk through downtown Santa Fe.
I get to live in a place I love, and I get to leave my house at 7:30 and walk four blocks up San Francisco Street toward the Plaza. There are a few dog walkers that I recognize, and we say hello, and sometimes I get to stop and pet their pooches and we exchange a few words about the amazing weather and is it going to rain and isn’t this a wonderful place to live?
Almost eight years ago this summer, I made the decision to move to Santa Fe, the city I had dreamed about living in since I was six years old. I didn’t have a job here, and I didn’t have much money, and I didn’t have any idea why I felt so compelled to make this move. Anyone with good sense would have steered clear of such a huge move with so few resources.
But I had suffered some recent heartbreak and I was feeling lonesome and old and 51 and tired of not doing exactly what I wanted with my life. I mostly wanted to live in a place that felt sort of like a city, but sort of small and safe, and sort of like home but sort of like something totally new. Mostly I wanted to take my life in my own hands and finally live it exactly the way I wanted.
My kids were grown, my parents were healthy, and it seemed like a good time to make a move.
So, in August 2012, I packed up everything in my pretty little house overlooking Ute Lake and loaded it in my Dad’s van and my cousin TJ’s red Dodge pickup and moved to a rent house on Don Felix Street in Santa Fe, just a few blocks from the Railyard. I still didn’t really have a job, or a real plan. Just a bit of home equity payoff in the bank and my blogging clients and a vague longing for a different life.
Fast forward to today. I have suffered and survived stage IV colon cancer, including surgery that left me with a colon that is about 10 or 12 inches smaller than it was in August 2012. I’m also missing some relatively small portion of my liver, since that’s where my cancer metastasized. Since June 2013, I have been “cancer free,” but every six months I go off to an oncologist for a scan with all my prayers said and my fingers crossed, hoping against hope that there is no recurrence.
About a thousand other people join me in my prayers. That’s my tribe out there, leaving nothing to chance.
In the interim between those visits, I get to live with a man who is all the things I wanted as a child – kind, smart, funny, decent, and yes, in fact, tall, dark and handsome. Who knew I could have exactly what I wanted?
I get to spend every single day with people I admire and like at my job, and I get to show strangers around this city I love. I get to go to a church that fills my heart with great faith and grace. I get to love my kids and my grandsons and my parents and the rest of my family, along with an embarrassing abundance of friends.
I also get to work on the board of the Cancer Foundation for New Mexico, sharing my story and helping others receive the resources and support they need while battling the horrific disease of cancer.
Mostly I get to be alive.
Cancer has hit me hard. Not only am I a survivor, but I have lost close friends and loved ones to it as well. Two of my great friends recently finished their marathon battle with this heinous disease, and I continue to be overwhelmingly sad about that state of affairs. Why do I get to be the one who survived? Why didn’t Jerry and Chris get to have a life like mine? Why were their battles so long and drawn out and ugly and devastating to the people who love them? Why do Chris’s daughters no longer have their Mama? Why does Yvette have to go on without Jerry?
And those questions apply to dozens of others who are either embroiled in the battle or who have already finished their race with cancer. I’ll never get it, and I suffer some horrible survivor’s guilt (that’s a whole ‘nother blog post, truly), but mostly I just never understand why I was spared. Believe me, I’m grateful. But I don’t get it?
Why did I get exactly the life I wanted and dreamed about? What is my purpose here? I think about it and pray about it often, hoping that I don’t squander a single day of my life.
Please don’t let me be meaningless in my activities, I pray, and then I say my favorite prayer – Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Bunny Terry is a native New Mexican who grew up on a farm in northeastern New Mexico. Her first writing job was typing stories on index cards on her family’s Underwood, stories that were uncannily like the ones she read over and over in O Ye’ Jigs and Julips, her favorite childhood book. No one thought to save those index cards for posterity, although there is the theory sarcastically circulated by her siblings that they will certainly be worth millions someday. 