Today is our wedding anniversary. We normally celebrate by going somewhere special. With Susie deaf in one ear, we like early reservations. This way restaurants tend to be quiet. With the pandemic and Susie being immune compromised, we have not been out on a “proper” dinner date. Thank goodness we live close to a lot of places who offer take away, also I’ve been told my cooking has greatly improved (hopefully, true :-). Susie is undecided what she wants. We had a delicious lamb soup last night, so my guess is she’ll want something lighter. Maybe I’ll get Sushi or make her scallops with lightly sautéed spinach.
Our anniversary has morphed a bit over the last two decades. A little over a year after Susie was diagnosed with Brain Cancer, World Cancer Day was declared as the date of our anniversary. And ten years ago Susie’s dear friend from university, Peggy Sikora, died from cancer, again on our anniversary. Both are heavy events to share with our anniversary. Even with Susie’s memory problems, the association with Peggy’s passing has not lifted, as it weighed heavy in her conversation last night.
I woke up this morning to see a notification it was a friend’s birthday, Frank Owen. He passed away last year from pancreatic cancer. A truly wonderful and impressive man, who helped guide our eldest to Cal Poly University (in San Luis Obispo) for engineering. We’ve known him and his family for over two and a half decades. Ever since our boys played together when toddlers and traveling together in Europe, when we lived in Cambridge and they in Munich.
I guess where I am going with the post is over the last two decades we’ve known many people afflicted by cancer. I had not given the disease much thought until it was up close and personal to us in 1999. As so many of our peers are now in their 50s and 60s, cancer seems to be an unsurprising diagnosis. It shouldn’t be. Hence I was pleased with this week’s White House Cancer Moonshot announcement, and so are many at the National Brain Tumor Society. What a good present to add light to our anniversary.
Godspeed to the newly assembled ARPA-H team.
