Come On Up for the Rising

A friend of mine has cancer.

I saw her today for the first time in a long time at our mutual friend's son's birthday party. She looks amazing. She looks the same as she always looks: put together, calm, cool, hip. She's on chemo indefinitely. She's always been a star: successful financier turned fashion entrepreneur. We talked about the past few years. In one run-on sentence, I relayed what our mutual friend had filled her in on prior. The melodrama: the sudden divorce, the start-up magazine, the breaking away from another bad relationship (work-related). The kismet: Meeting Shawn, getting pregnant, THE FAMILY GROOVE.com. It's a story I usually relish telling—so twisty and turny, so rollercoaster. It's like my own Frank Capra short and I usually love to regale people with it, but this time not so much. I knew I was sitting with her to hear her and not myself for once.

She filled me in on her past few years: her move to NJ; her thoughts on Suburban USA; how she so misses the city but wouldn't live there unless she could live well there; and her cancer. She said, "Everything's great except for the cancer."

She asked me how I felt about motherhood. When I asked her, without skipping a beat (I skipped many beats), she said, "I love it." There was nothing else in her words except truth. No buried thoughts, no apprehension, no hidden confusion, anger, fear—just truth. And she said it to me in the moment, right then and there, with no thoughts of what they were having for dinner or the bills that needed to be paid or a phone call she needed to return.

When she answered me, when she spoke those three word, it was like talking to god. I haven't heard such honest words come out of someone's mouth in so long. I haven't spoken to someone in such a long time who didn't have something else buried in their words. The intention and meaning behind those three words beamed light right into the depths of my soul.

I'll keep that purity and that truth with me always.

She is risen.