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.
my family never used to say it at all to eachother until about a year agom, really i could count how many times I had heard it on one hand.. it was sort of just assumed.. and then my sister’s best friends mom literally dropped dead one day and she was completely healthy– no reason to die– her heart just stopped and for some reason after that day we all started to say it much more often..