Andrew and I rode the elevator to the 7th floor of the Yawkey Center this morning for a check-up with Nurse Jill. She had told me that if my white blood cell count hadn't bottomed out by now, she'd probably order a transfusion. As we neared our stop, I could feel myself slipping into my usual haze of detachment for my next long appointment with a needle.

The elevator doors opened on a crowd of cancer patients and their companions waiting to board. Without quite registering why, I started to smile. Standing in front of me was Jon, my roommate from my early days in Cambridge a lifetime ago. I'd last seen Jon, a playwright and acting teacher, five years before, at his sixtieth birthday party, a happy clamor of friends, family and admirers on Martha's Vineyard, where he lived. I remember raising a toast to him that evening and to the tilting top floor of that three-family apartment we'd shared, a place so close to collapse you could drop a marble on the kitchen floor and watch it roll, unassisted, out the door to the deck. The seventies were in full swing then, our careers were just beginning to crystallize out of our odd jobs in theater, journalism, and educational television, and we thought we'd lived forever.

Jon and I hadn't sought each other out much since then. It was Arnie, the third member of our band of twenty-somethings, who'd told me that Jon had been diagnosed with liver cancer. Harriet had included Jon on her long email list for updates on my Lymphoma and he had sent a kind note of encouragement in return, but he'd never said a word to me about his own condition and I had hesitated to ask. My anxieties vanished as we stood in that rush of fellow patients seven flights up and hugged hello.

I was alarmed to see how thin he'd become. I remembered the evening we'd met, almost forty years ago, at an audition for an experimental theater company in Boston I had just joined. It was my first paying job since dropping out of graduate school in New York City a year before. After a month of acting classes with the company I had been asked to help develop and star in its latest play, an original production about the spiritual quest of a gaunt, suicidally depressed graduate school drop-out recently arrived in Boston from New York, based loosely on my condition at the time. The playwright had told me not to worry about my lack of experience on stage. All I'd have to do was play myself.

What impressed me most about Jon's audition that evening were his high spirits and playfulness, the vivid glitter of curiosity in his eyes and the puppy-like enthusiasm with which he wriggled through the yoga routines, mirror exercises and theater games the Artistic Director was conducting. If he joined the company, I remember thinking with a shudder, he'd probably give a more lively and appealing performance of me than I could myself.

I re-introduced him to Andrew, who'd become a young man since Jon had last seen him, and we exchanged some news. I told Jon I was still getting my sea legs with chemo, Jon told me he'd been talking with his oncologist about a new treatment they wanted him to try at a hospital in New York. I wished him luck and, after another quick hug, watched him board the elevator on the way down.

Suddenly, I felt myself enveloped and uplifted in a surge of tenderness. Just like that, in a moment of grace, after forty years of keeping Jon trapped in a bramble of hard feelings, my heart had set him free.

It seemed so silly now, but for the two years we'd lived together, I'd been driven slowly crazy by the way Jon treated my things. Sooner or later my most comforting possessions, from my television set to a favorite coffee mug, ended up in his room, or abandoned and forgotten in some corner of the apartment. I doubt he had any idea how upset I was with him or why; I had never said a word. Rather than trust either of us to talk about it, I'd let my slowly mounting indictment of his indifference press down in silence on everything between us like a layer of lead, making it hard for me sometimes to walk into the same room with him or lift a smile.

I'd made a lot of progress since then understanding that my problem with Jon was a weight of my own making;  and little in letting that burden drop. Yet here, without a moment's hesitation, I'd opened my heart to Jon in a flash. I had held on to feeling hurt for almost forty years; all it had taken was a second to let it go.

Long ago, at a dinner party with some old friends, Harriet had proposed a thought experiment. If we had only a month to live, she asked us, what were a dozen things we would want to do with the time? If we had only a week, what were three? And if we had time left for only one, what would it be? As we revised our lists, our wishes got simpler; for many of us, it seemed, what we'd want to make our lives feel complete wasn't an exceptional act of adventure, but a quiet moment with the people who'd mattered most; a chance to wish them well and say goodbye.

Cancer had made Harriet's game real for me. If I was running out of time, whom would I want to be with, that, like Jon, I had turned from in silence, without the grace to hear each other out? There were far too many, I thought, to get to in time.

"My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.”

Whatever happened next, I was grateful for the moment that had met me at the corner of Cancer and Now.

Silver Drachm, Metapontum (340-330 BC), photo by Curtius,

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