GRACE AND GLOW

I’m thinking today about Cecile Richards and wishing her a powerful journey. Just like her mother before her, the great Ann Richards, she faced cancer with the same moxie, purpose and humanity with which she lived and led others. She kept on. These two women made us feel accompanied by leaders we could believe in. I will carry them with me.

Thinking about them has brought me back to an experience I had years back. I was going to a clinic getting iron therapy every three weeks for anemia. I got hooked up to an IV for iron in a windowless back room together with the most amazing and inspiring men and women who were getting chemotherapy, some with stage 4 cancer. But one would have never known it!  You would have thought you were participating in a writer's coffee klatch in Santa Fe, the conversation was always so engaging and spectacular!  I learned about the gentrification that was happening in Harlem, the names and ages of everybody's pets and the effects of morphine—with hilarious act-outs.  I saw pictures of beautiful children and heard incredibly triumphant personal stories. And then—every time someone had finished their treatment and was ready to leave, they would approach everyone in that room and kiss them goodbye on the lips.  Each time someone kissed me, I felt exalted.  On one occasion, I was the last one to leave.  Before I did, I silently blew the room a kiss—and thanked it for being a space of hope and communion;  as holy as a church and as comforting as a summer camp.  I felt so blessed.

And that’s how I feel knowing that Ann and Cecil Richards were in this world at the same time as I have been. It gives me pause and makes me wonder, what if we lived this way all the time? With the ease, grace and glow of communion and purpose, knowing we are all branches of one magnificent tree.