Day 3

Today's favor touched me deeply. A young woman suffers from leukemia and a brain tumor and is currently undergoing radiation treatment. The prognosis from her doctors is anything but positive and time is of the essence regarding any sort of outreach to her.

Friends of the family started an email campaign to request greeting cards for the patient during her hospital-stay from friends, family and even complete strangers. I received a Favor request from one of the friends to send a get-well card to this brave teenager.

As I perused the aisle of greeting cards in the drugstore I discovered there were very few "get-well" cards that did not carry the guaranteed sentiment of "I know you will fully recover." This girl knows her health is failing...who am I to offer her a promise that may not deliver? She may recover and she may not. Something told me I needed to find card that offered her encouragement and compassion and that also told her I believed in her ability to handle anything she may encounter during her battle with these afflictions. Locating the perfect card took about 10 minutes. I'm attaching photo of the finished product and will be happy to pass along her full contact information for anyone wishing to send her positive thoughts and kind words.

Completing this favor made me face the issue of mortality and was especially difficult in light of the patient's age. So many things within this world leave us scratching our heads in disbelief and confusion. Loss of life is no different. Perhaps the best approach to explore a complex issue is the simplest. I lost a close friend to leukemia when he was only ten years old. Right before he left this world, he left me with this simply profound answer to the question of why it was his time to die: "We are all like library books. Some of us get checked out and renewed over and over again and others of us are returned to the library we came from after only a very short time." Apparently, he had read that analogy in an inspirational book during his hospital stay and the idea offered him much comfort. In retrospect, I share the notion that we are all books; all filled with seeming unique pages and stories to tell and yet we all return to the library eventually. We need to remember our underlying commonality when faced with perceived divisive differences. A shift in perception yields our way back to one another and to remembering the peace within each of us.