Daily Newsie

The good news is, I got the GA position I was salivating over, complete with a letter offering the tantalizing prospect of a partial tuition waiver. I’m quite excited about it, but today has been so gray that I’ll wait until later to celebrate.

I found out at lunch today that a former source and a good friend (we’ll call her A) has cancer. Again. She battled breast cancer several years ago and won, but this time it’s attacked her spine. The doctors say there isn’t a thing they can do for her, so now it’s time to wait and be comfortable. And suddenly I am clutching the telephone in my cousin’s office nine years ago, hearing my father on the other end tell me my mother had a brain tumor and feeling a rising wave of numbness in the pit of my stomach. This time, the numbness subsided much more quickly and anger took its place. Here is a woman who’s already been through hell and back, who faces every day with a smile and a joke, who makes light of the debilitating illness she beat into submission. And now it’s come back to take her life when millions of people across this earth are far more deserving of such a fate.

“It’s not fair,” I mumbled over and over at the Mexican restaurant today, toying with my nachos but not eating any. A friend sat across the table from me, nodding silently. The diagnosis was handed down only a few days ago, apparently, so I called A’s best friend just in case A’s usually uncrushable spirit was dampened by this latest blow. If she doesn’t call back tomorrow, I’m calling A at home to see if she wants some dinner, some reading material, some company while she waits for the inevitable. And I know the kicker will be that A will welcome me into her home with open arms and a happy heart while I fight back tears and this incredible, bitter anger that’s been boiling under the surface for nearly a decade.

It’s times like these I wonder if there really is someone controlling the universe … and, if so, why is He or She asleep at the wheel? It used to be a comfort that there was some sort of higher purpose that my mother’s death fulfilled, but too many years of missing her have dashed that hope to shreds. In a world that so desperately needs more people like A and like my mother, why do good people keep dying?