Alabaster Sky

After He Said Cancer | A Memoir

I couldn't take my eyes off the sky.

It was like someone had painted a heavy coat of pure white paint full of light above me. There were no clouds. So, the whiteness and the light stretched on forever.

I had just dropped off my daughter at school. But the light was so beautiful that I pulled over to enjoy the moment. Before my husband was diagnosed with cancer, I would have taken a quick look at the sky and continued driving to work. There would not have been time to stop and smell the roses or enjoy this luminous sky. But our cancer journey had changed me. Life was all about the small moments now.

Why am I so captivated by this alabaster sky, I wondered. Leaning forward, I looked intently at the sky, craning my neck to look up. No birds. No planes. The sky was empty but bright and radiant. Full of possibilities.

Suddenly, I noticed that my breathing felt easier and less burdened for the first time since my husband told me he had cancer. My chest had felt tight for so long that I thought this feeling would never go away. The weight on my chest was a reminder that I would never be the same. But now, my breathing was lighter for some reason.

I took another deep breath. Yes, I was struggling less to breathe. This surprised me so much that I took another long breath in and out, relishing the feeling. Yes, yes, yes!
The heaviness had eased a little. My entire body felt freer. The horrible corset that had restricted my chest for the last three years had loosened.

The only other time I had seen such a scene was on the Greek island of Santorini. White stucco houses sat clumped together on the hilltops against the stunning backdrop of the blue Aegean Sea. The whitewash on these houses was thought to disinfect them and was initially used in hopes of stopping a cholera outbreak in the late 1930s. But cholera spreads through infected water, not on the surface of buildings. So, whitewashing the village was useless as a public health measure, but it left a beautiful white vista.

I looked up again. The sky was so strikingly white and bright and endless that I allowed myself to get lost in its light. If I could fly into the sky, the journey might never end, I thought and smiled at this silly thought.

I knew very well that there was an end to the sky. In college, I studied the Earth's atmosphere. Clouds were contained in the first 10 miles of atmosphere above the Earth's surface. All layers of the Earth's atmosphere, including the outer layer where satellites orbited, stretched up from the Earth for thousands of miles. Yet, these facts didn't explain the wonder of this magnificent sky.

With a sky like this, the world and the future could hold any number of wonderful possibilities.

And then it struck me.

I was no longer thinking about my husband's cancer or his prognosis. I was daydreaming.

Was I starting to feel hopeful? Perhaps. The doom and gloom of the past three years was not with me in this moment. Normally, a morning drive like this one would have been the perfect time to retreat into anxiety and fear about his cancer, but it hadn't happened. Instead, my brain let in a stream of magical thoughts that swirled around in my head for several minutes while I stared at the sky.

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, keeping my gaze fixed on this washed-out sky. I couldn't remember the last time I felt hopeful, but I think this is what hope used to feel like. It was like I suddenly had a future that could be positive again.

Life will be OK, I thought. No matter what, it will be OK.

Without hope, life is dreary and dark. I had lived there and didn't want to go back. No matter what might happen, I didn't want to be without hope ever again.

I took a long last look at the sky and then sat back in my seat. I flipped the turn signal and checked the side mirror before merging into traffic. What had come over me? Somehow, the whitest and most radiant of skies had taught me to hope again.

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