Look, this beautiful dream.
A counselor was speaking to a small gathering of people, those who had just recently been informed of a diagnosis of cancer. It was a mixed group, some were patients with treatable forms, others were less certain of the prognosis, and a few advised that the time left to them in this life was quite short – the time to see the colors and feel the textures that the body had allowed, to taste the richness of foods or the salt of a lover’s lips, hear the song of a flock of migrating birds perched in the trees outside the house, or that of the soprano who had spent years perfecting her angels’ art. Knowledge that the morning’s printed news, both good and bad, would be an echo far away, like voices in another tongue and another land, voices whispered into the wind, would no longer reach their ears. That the endless daily striving after endless daily goals was vanity; that there was little time left to dance that dance.
For most, the winter chill that enters the air, stripping leaves and flowers, was suddenly ice in the heart and in the bones; the warmth we bank in the fireplace and in the arms of a companion against that cold, always fleeting, had suddenly flown. It drained away as a red coal of evening sun is extinguished by advancing night. Words left to be said would be left unsaid.
The counselor watched the reactions of each soul in the room. She saw in the eyes of these humans a mirror of how bedrock felt underfoot; in a moment’s reflected glance, the work of a lifetime of writing, thousands of circling thoughts which made and did not make the page; words that never came to the point, but which were always the silent point of every person’s dreams. She saw in the glass of each cornea a shadow of the self, moving within: saw that the outline was fading, the envelope failing, the failure self-evident, and the passage noted in the shadow’s pained expression.
– You can respond to this news in many ways, she said. – You will, in fact: you will respond in as many ways as there are people. You can disbelieve, you can continue the fantasy that this shell you are in will last forever; that this particular music keeps playing and playing, and you will always be dancing in the same way; that nothing changes. But whether your dance ends tomorrow or years from now, you were always in possession of the information that it ends.
The shadow responds when addressed. The body responds when addressed, when teased or tortured or pleased or comforted. The mind listens to the body’s response; it is difficult to inhabit a failing body.
– You will believe what you need to believe. But understand that you are among the few, the very few, who are given concrete information, and time enough to dwell on it with the body and with the mind. I work in this area because I wish to know that time is short – but I have great difficulty knowing what I have been shown so often. You are the few who are given the secret that you are alive… right now.
– You can respond in many ways: by cursing, by crying, perhaps by fighting and temporarily winning. You can despair. You can hurt others or yourself. You can spend millions to buy great pain for a few more months; or spend nothing and live for years to come. Every response is possible, even probable, you have it all within you, and I will help each of you, individually, find the path that is yours.
– But I wanted to share… I wanted to share the response of a man I knew. Not because you necessarily will understand it, and maybe you can’t, since I am just relating his words… I didn’t live them. I was there when he was told he had three months to live. The tension that his body had been holding – so much uncertainty, and all the aching nights accumulated in the weighted moment in that office – the tension suddenly left him, and on his face it was replaced by a beautiful smile: a quiet and sad smile, an infinitely gentle smile. I don’t know how to put bounds on that smile.
– He looked down, took a long slow breath, then let it out. He softly shook his head. Then he looked straight into my eyes. He spoke, as though he were translating his news, his mortality, and speaking the same news over me. He looked at me and into me and said:
Look: this beautiful dream.
– I hope I will never forget that. I wanted to share it with you, to whom it seemed most intimate, today.