I am traveling all day today.  My associate will by by at 7:30 AM and the two of us will be off for Coos Bay.  We are having lunch there will our “guide” and then meeting with the social service people from the Coquille Indian Tribe.  This is part of an effort to involve the Tribes of Oregon into collaborative work regarding child protection initiatives.  My associate and I will drive home after the meeting.  We will be lucky to be home twelve hours after we leave.

 

Would I do this if I really had a terminal diagnosis?  

 

Why not?  Assuming I was physically able, why not?

 

Child welfare is my life’s work and it’s work to which I have been led by the Spirit.  Why would I lay that down if I had only eleven more months to live, if I knew I were going to really die on September 3, 2007?

 

Stephen Levine writes that some people, upon getting such a diagnosis, feel liberated, feel they can really live, can do things that their “lives” prevented them from doing.  I don’t know to what extent I can really say that as the necessities of keeping my body and soul together do not now involve--and have not really ever involved--doing things that I hated.  That which has paid me and fed me has, pretty much, always been something I believed in (at least when I was doing it).  

 

So, if one is not alienated from one’s work why would one stop doing it in the end?  It’s a sincere question that I shall undoubtedly revisit as the next eleven months go by.