Lonnie’s Leukemia

Stephen Sangirardi   Lonnie’s Leukemia   Bard715@aol.com
 
   One of the best things about being happy is that we think we’ll never be unhappy again. This is true for a single night or for an extended period in our lives. I know that when I think of those days, there is a phrase from Tennyson that keeps running through my mind, like a beautiful melody that has its notes arranged in just the right order and articulates the deep longing in the heart that haunts me: “O death in life, the days that are no more.” No more. So this is why people write memoirs and autobiographies about their past in order to preserve it, because they are convinced that their past was much more Mardi Gras than their life now. Ubi sunt—where are the good old days? Whither has fled the golden age that we think comprises our life? Is there a dimension where the past still exists, or is that dimension solely within our snowballing memory that we can dip into and pluck out in word pictures, after shaking off the snow? A wife beshrews us. She doesn’t like it when we play loudly the ancient music that is the soundtrack of our past, and then we instantly wonder if girl X. would have made a better wife instead. Would she have doused the angst that has crept into the present and ensconced us in a big house in Greenwich surrounded by pine trees and a lake and endless money?
   Egads! Here I am cloying myself with the days that are no more, when the girl who lives next door from me found out that she has a lethal strain of leukemia. There is a good chance that she is going to die soon and, I suppose, that means that her future will be, no more. Let me get this straight—I am melancholy that my past is no more, while this lovely girl in the house adjacent mine, who also teaches Sunday School, may not have a future anymore. What is askew about this picture?
   I consider myself a person of empathy–ha–and yet I have not spent enough time considering the imminent fate of Lonnie, this young lady fated to die within a year; the gloom she must be feeling. I’m sure that the one who asked for her blood in marriage thinks of little else. I’m sure the mother and father and siblings of Lonnie think of little else. But me? I like to excavate my past, dust off the shards and think about those halcyon days of Missouri with my nostalgic eyes. My neighbor is absolutely dependent on a sibling’s bone marrow for her survival. I, on the other hand, suck my own marrow dry to locate the residual morsel I gorged upon years ago…and use stupid language doing so.
   I have always felt that the deepest purpose of writing is to mitigate the suffering of humanity. How many novels have done that? ‘The Jungle’. ‘David Copperfield.’ Didn’t they effect social change? Then there was probably some book about a severely handicapped person that made a less severely handicapped person accept life with more tranquility. Now, what can I write that will make Lonnie feel better about the life she is soon to lose? I’m not sure, but I think all writing is self-indulgent compared to this girl’s fate. And does she stare out the window and recollect that time last year when she and her fiancé went to France, a trip she told me about at a time when she had no clue about her impending leukemia, and whisper aloud to herself, “O death in life, the days that are no more?”