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.