Live Like You Were Livin'

There's a popular Tim McGraw song called Live Like You Were Dyin'. The lyrics chronicle the thoughts of a man who's faced with a life-threatening diagnosis and explore the things he does in light of his impending early demise. His activities run the gamut from the extreme --skydiving and mountain climbing-- to the everyday mundane --being a better, kinder person and spending more time with his family. It's about living life to the fullest, and it makes me cry every time I hear it. It ends with the line:

Some day I hope you get the chance to live like you were dyin'.

I'd never spent much time reflecting on those lyrics until recently. If you're anything like me, you probably get caught up in pleasant music and sing along at times without really noticing the actual words. Once I cued in to what I was actually saying a few days ago, I was struck, and for several different reasons.

For one, I can say with utmost honesty that I didn't even come close to understanding what those words meant until August 16, 2010. I think we all talk about not taking blessings for granted, taking time to smell the roses, and appreciating every moment we're blessed to enjoy here, but it's hard to do those things with a full heart when life is easy; when there's never been a major hurdle to scale or obstacle to overcome. When you've never had a chance to be truly triumphant over adversity of the worst kind. So yes, I can say that I understand, through our experience with Logan, what McGraw means when he sings about 'living like you were dying'. I've been doing that for a while now.

But now that things have shifted for us, I want to view it not as living like we're dying, but living like we're living. I guess I should explain this a little more. Our cold, hard reality is that we'll probably never enjoy the level of comfort with Logan's health that 99.9% of you enjoy with all of our little ones. That's simply one of the indelible side effects of his cancer. As a result, we can continue to live in the shadow of the spectre of what could happen --live like we're dying-- or we can opt to reside fully in the moment, cognizant and accepting of our blessings, without allowing the darkness of cancer to dampen our spirits. We can live like we're living. See the difference? We can live in fear of each MRI --and there will be many more to come in the future-- or we can choose to live in earnest, without fear and with as much joy as possible.

It sounds like it should be a simple choice to make; option B is by far the superior one of the two. But it's amazingly hard to commit oneself to that kind of life of faith. Because that's what it is: A full-on life of faith.

In hindsight, I probably should've started this entry by sharing today's MRI news, since not all of you are connected to me on Facebook. After a very long night followed by a torturous morning that led into a nailbiter of an afternoon, Philippa finally called Adam with the read at about 2, as interpreted by Dr. T and the neuro radiologist. The scan was stable, and showed no signs of active disease. It looks, as she told Adam, clean.

Although we might've preferred to see absolutely nothing out of the ordinary --no scar tissue, no remnant dead tissue-- she assured us that it's good news. As badly as I want to jump up and down over it, the past 10 months have made me a more cautious person, so I'm just quietly enjoying the sense of relief. He'll be put back on some oral chemo drugs in a few weeks once his platelets stabilize, not because there's anything visible, but as a just-in-case measure. And he'll continue with his BMT clinic visits and evaluations.

As for me, I'll be working on living like I'm living, having faith and being thankful. Please keep praying for Logan and for our family; his kind of cancer has a high rate of relapse, so we'll need continued protection from that well into the future. But today is still the start of a new life, a new perspective, a new sort of reality, and for those things, we are beyond thankful to God.