A wanderer above the mist
I am typing this at my office desk. Today is my last day here at the university where I work. The last day before a flood of changes commences. Tomorrow I am flying to Florida for a week’s vacation with my family. Five days after we return, I’ll be boarding a plane to Peru for the summer. Two weeks after I come back from South America, I will move to Georgia where I’ll begin my MPH.
And, on one level, I am incredibly excited.
I love change. Relish it, in fact. I have itchy feet that love to stray, to walk new ground, to explore. Though leaving the familiar is always difficult, the very challenge of being uprooted and stripped of the everyday things that define me lies at the root of why I travel.
But cancer has reminded me of the shrouded nature of the future. I feel like the explorer in Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer. (A title which can be translated into English as Wanderer Above the Mist. ) In it, a man stands atop a mountain, his back to the viewer, overlooking a peak-studded valley almost wholly hidden by fog. His face, which looks away from us and off towards the horizon, isn’t visible. His expression remains a mystery. As does the topography before him, hidden beneath the fog.* The painting is an apt metaphor.
I, too, stand on a precipice. The path before me is veiled. My mother’s mortality looms in the future, but right now it is small and indistinct, soft around the edges. I struggle to make out the shapes hulking in the fog, but it is impossible. My emotions at this view are varied–at times excited, terrified, even ambivalent. But the future is inscrutable.
I can make guesses, though. My mother has been confined to her wheelchair due to a recently discovered pathological fracture of her sacrum. Her pain meds have been bumped up to serious, rest-of-your-life levels. Her speed-walking days, according to her radiologist, are over permanently. I finally gained permission to e-mail her doctor for more information, but I wonder if he will (or can) answer my pressing question: is it all down-hill from here? I have placed great hopes in his having a better view than mine. But I don’t know. As he tells my dad when he presses for a time line or a prediction “I’m not god.”
God, too, is silent.
For now, it seems, I am left to the small patch of ground beneath my feet. I am forced to move one step at a time. To listen to the wind, or the dying echos of my own voiced frustrations bouncing off the unseen rock. Though I long to see the future, cancer reminds me of my own lack of control, the futility of prophecies or predictions. I simply cannot know.
And so we all move, down our own separate shrouded paths. One slow, shake step at a time. Towards a future we will not know until it arrives beneath us as the present.
Just like you.
*You can view a photograph of the painting at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderer_above_the_Sea_of_Fog
