More than one year flew by since I last added a post to this blog. It has been a year of questions.
Questions precipitated by the diagnosis of a pelvic mass that could be the uncontrolled growth of a malignant tumor. The dreaded C-word shut out anything as superfluous as a blog post.
For one week I lived with the uncertainty of cancer.
One week of sleepless nights and painful days.
One week during which I asked myself whether I would agree to toxic treatments if that mass was actually malignant. One week in which I asked myself whether death was imminent. One week in which I was separated from my family, tethered to a bed, and subjected to all sorts of poking and prodding in the most embarrassing of bodily orifices.
That week culminated with the removal of a large-grapefruit-sized pelvic mass. When I woke up, I was told the mass had been biopsied, and declared a benign ovarian cyst. Ten days later that diagnosis was confirmed by lab reports after the mass was dissected and tested more extensively.
One week of sleepless nights and painful days was no longer such a big deal.
Given the encouragement of, “You’re recovering fantastically well,” at a ten-day post-surgery visit; and “You can consider yourself fully healed,” at a five-week post-surgery visit, I could now get on with the rest of my life.
That brought on many more questions.
Questions such as, what’s the point of it all? Why am I alive? What’s the meaning of life? And what the heck is my purpose in life anyway?
Questions, of course, no one ever asked before.
Certainly, questions no one answered to my satisfaction throughout the sixty-plus years I’ve been asking them.
For the first five decades, religion attempted to provide comfortable illusions but an innate sense of curiosity and unlimited skepticism shot through them, again and again. I tried to bury the doubts. I prayed they would be forgiven.
Then I stopped praying. I decided that if, indeed, a supernatural divine power existed, no divine power could be impacted by prayer or threatened by the doubts of a puny old human.
I moved from full-blown doubts to apostate status.
Now I’ve reached atheist.
I think.
At the end of my last message I asked whether anyone could give me a reason for continuing this blogging madness.
One person responded.
It’ll be interesting to see whether more respond to the statement that this Amish grandma has seemingly evolved into an atheist.
