Achievement

I was late for my mammogram this time. Owing to a close family member having had breast cancer I am on a two year schedule, but in fact it was closer to three years since the last check. I felt a bit aberrant about that.

The woman took the usual group of pictures and some minutes later returned to say that the radiologist wanted one more. That led to her returning a few more minutes later again to say that she needed to take one deeper into the left breast.

I co-operated completely and quietly. But, by now, I was secretly, internally, shaken. Left in the room by myself, I had an urge to run. Remembering Eckhart Tolle's advice to simply focus on the breath I closed my eyes and did just that.

Now, another woman entered, bright and breezy; some story about how funny it had been, she and some other woman drawing straws as to who would do the last ultrasound before lunch. This sort of blithering surely had to mask bad news, I was sure.

'Is there something wrong with the mammogram?'

'No, we didn't see anything on the mammogram. The ultrasound is routine. We like to cross-check. If you could come over to the other side of the hall with me...'

She rolled her equipment around one breast at a time. She sometimes chatted away almost to herself, how I should keep the pictures safely at home for next time, and how pictures spoke in a way that words couldn't in a report, and sometimes she was silent. It was when she studied the screen intensely that I closed my eyes and began to think how to spend the rest of my life, however long I should have.

Joy. I wanted joy. Not a single thought of accomplishment, or lack thereof, came to mind. My children's faces, as they are right now, came before me, one by one. The thought of death didn't bother me. Leaving them behind without me in their lives. That did.

When I was left alone in the room again, whilst they did their comparing of information gathered, I remember thinking, 'It is what it is', such that it was an anti-climax when she bounced back into the room and said, 'That's all fine now. Here are your films and if you could just give this  invoice to the girl at the desk, we'll see you next time...'

I hadn't realized just how worked up the exercise had made me. When I mentioned it to a friend immediately thereafter, tears gushed down my face. It was a mini look into the face of death and I hadn't cared for it at all. I had to agree with Woody Allan that "my position on death remains the same. I am against it."

Although I tried hard to focus on the future in the worst moments, I have to admit a tinge of resentment crept in; that the last few years had been short of joy here at home. Back home, it led me to consider in detail this business of 'achievement' in our lives. I admit that it has not been my focus. Or, it has been my focus, but perhaps not in the usual, expected way. The happiness and wholeness of my children have been my focus; the offering to the world of four happy, well-adjusted people who understand the role of joy and laughter in their lives. (Would it not be a better world if mothers were to make this more of a focus?)

In my reading on achievement yesterday and today an example was given of a man accruing some millions of dollars in the bank. For some people such an achievement  was deeply satisfying, for this had been one of their goals. For a person whose goal was to give to others of himself, the achievement of plenty of money in the bank would not have the same power or value.

Achievement is something that only we can define for ourselves. It has to be said that the lack of achievement of our goals, whatever they may be, can make us miserable, and this is what happened here at home; to both of us, but in different ways and for different reasons. Our goals in the past several years have been different; our own individual goals that tended to push us apart.

I am absolutely fine, but, when I pushed up against my own mortality yesterday I thought not of money, or achievement in terms of a novel to my name; none of that. I thought of how I might live for the rest of my time on this earth with joy. And, I thought of my children and how I would prepare them for a life without me here with them. I was prepared, it seems, to die as I had lived; to think of achievement on my own terms.