A funeral and a wedding

January 24th

I spoke with a colleague from work half an hour ago on a smoking break. I haven’t seen him in the office last Thursday and Friday and asked him if he was on vacation. He wasn’t. Now — I need to say first that his wife is an oncology nurse in a children’s hospital in my city. He told me that on Thursday he went with his wife to a funeral of a 7 years old girl, his wife’s cancer patient who, after several months in the hospital, lost her battle with that fucking disease. On Friday, he and his wife traveled to a wedding of a now-grown woman, who as a teenager about 10 years ago was a cancer patient in that hospital for several months. Now she is cancer-free and getting married and starting a family.

I wanted now to write something, anything — be it profound or silly or inconsequential, but my mind is blank.

We don’t really know what is going around us, we don’t know the tragedies and triumphs people around us go through and experience. People we know and strangers we pass in the streets. And yet we are very quick to judge others by our standards and experiences. I know I do. And I don’t like it about myself. And I want to change it. And I will.