7:40 am

On the road to Sevilla. I was reading an article about the experiences of a woman who had cancer. I was thinking about how agonizing it would be to go through that. The pain, the fatalism, the philosophizing. It shocked me when I realized I was half-way through the story before thinking about my father -- or my mother. Why is that? I have lived with cancer. Maybe I never allowed myself to think how horrible it must have been for each of them. The agony. The despair. The helplessness. The loss of "dignity." The loss of self-reliance.