Sunday

Bill has had a difficult couple of days. Something keeps going wrong with something that I can't write about on a blog, and it is very discouraging. It happens at all hours, wrecking his sleep way too often. And then there's the bleeding, and the weird infection, and the fear that every pain is a new tumor, and on and on and on.

But wow. It is hard to write about these little problems we have right now when I take the time I should take (and should take more often) to remember that everyone--everyone--and that includes YOU, our pals, reading this right now--has his and her own miseries, troubles, fears, and pains, whether physical, emotional, or spiritual. And yes, cancer can be a big one, but suffering is suffering, and Cowboy and me ain't the only ones gettin' a dose.

Bill says he's spent some insomnia hours lately, thinking about suffering and life and all that. He says he sees it differently now. He says that in some ways life can look not so much like a holiday in paradise, but more like a campout in a sort of prison, and that maybe it's a good thing that we eventually get out. And here we are, trying so hard to stay here.

But the thing I liked best that he said--and it's not something no one's thought of--but maybe it's just the quiet way he said it to me and how sweet his thin and tired face looked when he said it--was that we should all try hard to remember that life itself--just life all on its own--deals out more than enough misery to every single one of us, and for that reason, everybody should just try as hard as they can to be as nice as they can to everybody else.

I was just about to write this sentence: So you can see that what Bill said wasn't some big new thing, like a new theory of relativity...

And I deleted that sentence.

But then, maybe it IS a kind of theory of "relativity"--if the fact that we all have to suffer, and we're all in this life thing together, and all at the very same time, kinda makes us relatives.