The Brave In-Between

Life in the liminal space

Dear Friends —

My dad raised me to love sports without clocks. I think he understood that hope is a bit more ever-present when you’re aware that a game’s momentum can gracefully shift with a surprisingly powerful serve, a clutch at bat, or an elegant putt — without the constraints of an arbitrary timer to remind everyone the game is nearly over.

So thank God for tennis. In the days after my awful plunge into the abyss earlier this summer, I got home in time to pair my recovery with Wimbledon’s magic to keep me company. Hope in the form of cross-court winners on those grass courts reminded me during the tender couch recovery days that my own story may have more momentum shifts too.

Which brings us to the latest news. These past few days have been nail-biters on the health front, so the US Open arrived just in time to distract me as I edged closer to a scan. If you are ever presented with complicated news, and especially as you sort it all out, I might suggest keeping one eye fixed on the captivating Coco Gauff, who reminded us all this weekend that every ball is worth a mighty chase.

Here’s my update from this week’s scan — we have a mixed bag on our hands. The good news is that immunotherapy clearly has had some remarkable benefits: there’s no new cancer activity. My gut and lymph nodes and all the rest are in terrific shape. The more complicated news is that the existing itty bitties in my lung are growing again, albeit very slowly. That slow pace is a key plot detail for us for the next part of the story, and so we ought to give immunotherapy the win for that too.

Oh and I’ve fully recovered from the literal gut punch from many weeks back. Bodies do love to heal, and I’m forever grateful I’ve bounced back. I’m now back to feeling completely fine, even as I wrestle with how to keep feeling completely fine.

What comes next? There are a couple of obvious calls we’ll put in motion. I can take an easy peasy chemo pill to keep the slow growth slow. Apparently the main side effect is feeling a little sluggish. And if this lady knows how to do anything, it’s how to live through sluggish. All good.

There’s a chance the “keep it in the slow lane” approach may be a long-term endeavor, so we’ll explore that as the fall unfolds.

But there could be more options to consider. Faithful readers will remember clever Dr. S from Scottsdale — he and I met this week to ponder the scan, and potential next steps. He’s bullish on a new trial which seems ideally matched for the biomarkers within my itty bitties. The drug has worked well for our friends navigating leukemia and there’s an intriguing case to make that it could work for colon people. We’ll see.

This is a new season on the mountain. When I first began this trek more than four years ago, my medical team provided me with a solid playbook, a map of sorts for the climb. While not easy, the map guided me to days full of good health — joyful days, exhausting days, and miraculous milestone days, moments that remind us how important it is to savor each switchback, no matter how steep.

After thousands of steps, I’m here to tell you this mountain comes with all kinds of quirks. If there’s one that stands solidly apart, it’s the near constant fixation I have with time. How much time do I have left? Isn’t it magnificent that I’ve gotten as much time as I have from when this story began? When’s the next scan? Will the images provide a clue about how many more steps I have on the mountain? Am I still in the beginning of this climb, or maybe inching toward a summit of sorts?

These are mostly unanswerable questions, and yet it’s nearly impossible to not constantly ponder them. Four years is a long time to ponder the same questions over and over, so I’ve reached a provisional conclusion: I live in the in-between time. A liminal space. I live on a bridge that spans over the middle area between confidence and frailty.

I’ve lived in this space long enough to collect lots of postcards, notes capturing observations and moments of wonder from the beautiful and the terrible. Many of you have read them all, and everything about that is generous and lovely.

In the early days, I went searching for books that would capture how it feels to live in this in-between time, especially one that captured the vantage point of doing all of this as a single parent (there must be millions of parents out there like me, climbing a similar mountain). If only … if only there were a book called The Brave In-Between. Oh wait!

Publication date is June 4th, 2024

I know it. Just when my nest has gone empty with Lucy and Connor now crushing it in college, your intrepid mountain climber has a new baby, and she’ll be coming to bookstores near you in June 2024. It’s all early days in some ways (cover isn’t quite yet locked) and there’s important work to do in the months before publication date. But I wanted you all to be among the first to know these postcards have helped inspire a wider frame of ideas and stories from the past decade of my life, which will hopefully resonate with others who find themselves living through a heightened back and forth between the beautiful and terrible.

This book will be a grand adventure, and the beginning of a new season. How long will this season last? I have no idea! But I do know this: the better question to ask in it all is who am I becoming as this new season unfolds?

A few weeks ago, Connor, Lucy and I spent a few days savoring Tahoe’s summer delights. One afternoon, Connor and I were sitting outside on a deck and we spotted a large nest, cleverly wedged into a shady corner of a roof with easy access to the sky. And then we looked more closely and spotted a flourish, a declaration of sorts from what I can only imagine is the world’s most fabulous bird. She adorned her now empty nest with white ribbons, perhaps a way to say that all that careful work she put into building that nest wouldn’t be complete without a little razzle dazzle.

Best nest. Ever.

Maybe this bird knows — as I do now — that a nest, empty or not, always has a new story to tell. We know this because the best stories live on, forever reimagined and passed along, and are made even better with lovely covers and decorative ribbons.

The best stories capture the mysterious in-between, and maybe — just maybe — discover a new way of understanding it all, on our own pace. Without a clock to tell us when it’s over.

xoxo