Saying “I Love You”

Since the diagnosis i feel like i have an increased capacity to love people, and for people to love me.  or, put another way, i’m more likely to tell people i love them, and they to tell me.  people whom i very close to (but never said it), but also people whom this ordeal brought me closer to.

I don’t think it is the fear that i might not get the chance to say it b/c i might die, but rather that the possibility that i may die spurs me to do things I really wanted to do anyway.  its not that the diagnosis has me backed into a corner, but rather that it has become an opportunity to take advantage of.

I guess I became much more comfortable with the idea of loving platonically in the last few years.  I’m not sure when it happened, but it did.  I became much more comfortable with saying it, even to my parents.  I mean, of course, I love my parents, but I think that in the last few years something changed about the way I related to the phrase that allowed me to really mean it.  Or to recognize that emotion as love, though a different kind of love than romantic love.

So I got more used to saying it, and the idea of it.

Correspondingly, my cancer caused my friends to tell me they loved me.  I could speculate on causes: that it was the fear that I might die and they might never be able to tell me, or that the *realness* of the cancer allowed them to break out of their fear, or soomething else equally speculative.  But I will simply say that it has happened, and it is comforting.