I've been going through some minor turmoil lately....that nameless, faceless anxiety that usually grips me with a sense of "something bad is about to happen". Yet when I try and nail down what it is that's bothering me, I often cannot name it. I've been having some melancholic dreams - usually I am in a situation/home/business and I feel a sense of sadness, though when I wake I cannot say why I was sad in the dream. Then I started to see a pattern in my waking life that may explain it. That old bastard, cancer, has been occupying my thoughts. My mom's birthday was Saturday and she would've been 76 - another "first" since she died. I took the day to remember the good and celebrate her memory.

Then all this came to a head on Sunday when I learned that a young cancer patient whose blog I'd been following finally succumbed to his illness. You may have heard about him. His name is Miles Levin and he was just shy of his 19th birthday when he died Sunday morning. His story was one of hope amidst the tragedy that is cancer. Maybe I shouldn't have involved myself in this having lost my folks to cancer so recently, but I still found a lot of inspiration in his story. He'd been diagnosed in June 2005 with sarcoma and had the usual ups and downs. His family and friends rallied around him and he also had a great fighting spirit and warm heart. But in the end, the cancer was just too devastating and all the treatment avenues were exhausted. He got the chance to do a lot of the things he always wanted to do - indulge his artistic side, graduate high school, go to senior prom, etc. But what I really identified with were the entries in the blog from his family members, especially his mother who was/is a psychotherapist. I could see the same desperation in the helplessness she felt to make an impact on her son's cancer. I was there - the gnawing voice in the back of your head that says "you're a therapist, you should be able to cope with this", only to realize that all your vaunted training doesn't mean shit when it's your mother or son dying in front of your eyes and there's not a damn thing you can do to stop it. As Ms. Levin said yesterday,

"Talk about destiny, G-d's plan, purpose, anything you want, but the fact is that our boy, our beloved son and brother, was snatched from us, and it hurts. We knew it was coming, yet we're shocked. We knew it was coming, yet we're unprepared. We knew it was coming, yet it feels unreal. We knew it was coming, but we hate it."

You can't prepare well enough. Even when you try to rationalize it all with "they're no longer in pain" or "at least they got to make their peace before they died" and a dozen more, it still hurts as much as if you had no forewarning. There's also the mix of relief that it's over and the guilt you feel for being relieved....crazy...

So to some extent, I know what they mean when they talk about the jumble of emotions they're feeling and the inescapable pain of the loss. One can only endure it.