"It's no use reminding yourself daily that you are mortal:
it will be brought home to you soon enough."
~ Albert Camus

There are times when you realize that all the things you worry about on a day-to-day basis, all the anger or frustration you feel in relationships and insecurities, and all the stresses that seem so huge, really mean very little.

In the past few weeks, I've experienced 3 crises of mortality that illustrates just how little these things matter when it comes to your loved ones. First, my yearly thyroid checkup came out as negative. For those of you who don't know, I have an enlarged thyroid, and had a serious cancer scare about 4 years ago. I had to go in for an x-ray, a cat scan (or MRI? I always get those two confused), and then finally a biopsy. In those three days, the tests kept telling me that it might be a malignant tumor. In the end, it turned out to be benign, and something to watch. And every year since then, I've gone in, gotten my scan, and been sent on my way.

A couple of weeks ago, I went in, and they called me that afternoon. "You need to come back the next morning to do some more tests," they said. "Your results were irregular." I was flooded with the fear that I experienced years before. It turned out ok, but I had to wait a weekend before I was cleared.

More recently, my mother became the target of a life-threatening attack. I won't go into details because its very, very personal, but suffice to say that her and my stepdad's lives were deliberately threatened by someone very close to me. I think this scared me more than the prospect of having cancer. My mother is close to 60, and despite my very large stepfamily, really the only person I have left in this world. Its always been me, her and grandma, and since grandma passed in 1999, we've been each other's best friends. I had to choose between that someone that threatened her, and her - and there was no question. I cried over the threat, I cried over the potential loss of my mother, and I cried because I had to take steps to make sure that it would never happen again. I hurt that someone important to me very much, but what could I do? I already feel all alone in this world sometimes - shunning intimate relationships as I do - I can't bear to lose the one person that I love more than anyone else in the world.

Then, today, I heard that someone that I've been on not-so-good terms with recently was in an accident. It didn't seem to be serious, but we still haven't heard from him. And worry has been gnawing away at my insides. Suddenly, it seems that all the reasons that I hated him for hurting me seemed so inconsequential. Yes, I still feel deeply hurt and betrayed. But what's more important is that he's ok. How I will react when we hear from him, whether I will express my relief, I don't know. If he never knows that I care, it doesn't matter. But if I had a choice, if I could make the choice to erase the last few weeks of anger and frustration between us, I would.

Every day, we live in little boxes built from fears and insecurities. Those emotions overwhelm us and obsess us, but in the end, what do they really matter? As Camus said, when we are faced with ours and our loved ones' mortality, it is brought scathingly, searingly home. And now that it has been, I am abandoning those little boxes as best I can, and choosing to appreciate the love and life that God has given me.