My Afterlife Series – Wakeup Call
By Susan Keats, Contributor & Seize-the-Day Propagandist Greetings from my afterlife. I’m not dead yet, by the way, but I had a glimpse of my death recently and I realized, upon considering it, that I was completely unprepared to have it arrive so soon. Why is it that sometimes we need a good kick in the teeth every so often to get us to sit up and pay attention? My kick came in the form of cancer on a routine mammogram. There’s nothing like a good cancer diagnosis to push you into a state of acute awareness. Hello, this is your WAKEUP call! Suddenly there I was, crying until I couldn’t cry any more, scared like I’d never been scared before. I spent many hours sobbing through such thoughts as, “But I was supposed to live to be ninety!” And, “This is the end? I’m finished? How can this be true?” I wondered why, why? I’ve always been healthy. I don’t fit the profile of a person who typically gets a cancer diagnosis. For goodness sake, my best friend from college still likes to tell everyone about how I once offered her pea pods as a snack. What followed the diagnosis was a whirlwind of medical tests, biopsies, assorted painful things, surgery, then the inevitable sickness of chemo and the weariness of radiation therapy. I lost my hair, I gained nearly twenty pounds. But strangely, what emerged from the whole experience once it was finally over was a metamorphosis of sorts. I re-emerged as if I had been living in an alternate world. I saw so many things clearly now. I deserved a really beautiful pair of butterfly wings. Because I had been so sick, I now understood how wonderful it is to feel well. I had been so complacent before. I had so easily put things off for some later time. Now, because I had to face that I could die, I found the strongest desire to live life, to go, to do, to experience, to see things!
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