Living with the Knowing.

Randy Pausch died on Friday. You know, the "Last Lecture" guy. The guy who found out he had terminal pancreatic cancer, then delivered the most unbelievable lecture at Carnegie-Mellon, wrote a best-selling book on "The Last Lecture", then was featured on Primetime with Diane Sawyer. When most of us found out about this man this past spring, he had already been told he had less than six months to live. He lived for almost a year and packed in the most inspiring and heart-wrenching story of the year. Everyone should be required to read his book while they are still healthy....taking life and their health for granted. I knew I would hear of his passing one day, but it still seemed so sudden and sad when it happened last Friday. For all that Randy Pausch was, he was definitely a man who knew how to live with the knowing.

I never wanted to live with the knowing. I used to say in my young and naive days, long before cancer ever entered my picture, that when I died, I wanted to go quick. A wreck, a heart attack, or even to be so old that I would not know what was happening to me. I wanted the easy way out....quick....painless....unaware. The last thing I ever wanted...ever...was to be told that my life
was going to be condensed, cut short, put into Cliff Note form. To me, that was a fate worse than death itself. And now that I live in the knowing, I have to admit that some days, it is. It is so hard to wake up from a good night's sleep and go, "oh I still have no breasts". Or be dreaming during a nap....dreaming as a normal woman with a normal life and awake in a car headed home to pain, sleeplessness, and the knowing.

Having a chronic, catastrophic disease is really not about the symptoms. I have learned that my
wonderful medical team can and will take care of every skin eruption, headache, nausea, reflux,
neuralgia, bone pain, arthralgia, mouth sores, shortness of breath, fever.....well, you get the picture. They can and will treat all the nastiness the disease and its treatment manifests in my
body. What they cannot do is tell me how...HOW do I....day after day, live with the knowing.

There is so much irony in life and there is no doubt that God had his own path for me to walk on.
For some hard to-understand-reason, God thought it better that I live with the knowing. He knew it was the only way for me to live my life with depth and love and meaning. He has chosen to allow me to walk this path of living and walking in the knowledge of just how precious this life is. That this road I am on is full of bumps and twists and dangerous turns, but it is also a road that takes me to such beautiful, unexpected places. Places that I see with such appreciation and clarity. I see people on this road who are now so precious to me, so loved by me, and I know for certain that I would never have them so close to my heart had I not had to live with the knowing. My experiences are richer, my days are fuller, my focus off the material and on the spiritual.

I would have loved to have learned these things I know without the diagnosis I was given. But we are so sinful and flawed as humans, that sometimes, the only way we can learn the true and great lessons of life is to have to think that life will be taken away from us sooner than we had planned. Randy Pausch knew this well and left us all a great little lesson book for living. I pray that everyone who reads this will read about him and learn to live.... and learn to live without the burden of knowing that your life could be done before you really learn what living is all about.

"The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me." Galatians 2:20