You don't know me

It’s a terrible thing to say, but it’s true. Nobody truly knows me anymore. Not my friends, not men and women I’ve seen and had coffee and conversation with and shared fellowship meetings with for 13 years. Even the people I love the most – and who love me in return – don’t really know me any more. Neither my mother nor my wife. Not my brothers. Not Mark who loves me better than just about anybody else and not Jimmy who helped me get sober.

It’s not that these people, all of whom care about me, don’t wish to know about me, it’s just that knowing me, really knowing me, is impossible.

You see, the "me" they once loved is gone, replaced by a new me. This new me is different from the old me, very different. To be sure, I seem to be pretty much the same from the outside. I look the same, just a bit skinnier and with a bit less hair. I dress the same. My beliefs haven’t changed. I’m still a liberal and proud of it. I still love Law and Order and The Simpsons and can’t stand any reality show. I still love serenity and constancy in my life and hate conflict and uncertainty. And so on.

But I’m not the same person I was before the cancer arrived all unbidden to take up lodgings in my lungs.

I am not the same because my perceptions of the world and my place in it have shifted just slightly, the way an image can shift just a bit when reflected in window glass or seen in an imperfect mirror.

Of course the people who love me, who care for me, don’t know I’m not the same because there’s no way they could know. But when we’re together talking or laughing or hugging or whatever it is that we’re doing, everything from my end is colored just a bit, skewed just the slightest bit by this thing that’s growing inside me or, rather, by my knowledge of the thing that’s inside me.

It’s not that I’m always thinking about cancer or about death or about loss or gloom. I’m not. I have my moments, to be sure, but not that many. It’s not that. It’s more like the illness, the diagnosis and prognosis have put the thought of death in my mind, always just below the surface of my consciousness. And with the thought of death never very far beneath the surface I find that I detach myself a bit from everything I do so I can observe the closing of my. I do this, I think, becauseI truly believe that the way I die is important. Because I believe what I leave behind is important.

I wish I could better explain the change in me to the people who love me. I perceive it in myself, I know it’s there but I can’t explain it fully, not even to myself.

In face, words just seem to get in the way, to make understanding more difficult. As a consequence, the times I feel closest to the people I love and who love me is is when we’re together in silence or, and this is even better, when I’m alone thinking of those who care.