A conversation on the couch

Hello, everyone.

As we move into our lives without her, I have one last thing I want to share with you. I recently found a recording of Nancy on my phone. Last July, she and I were having a conversation on the couch in our living room, and started talking about the battle, the future, our belief and faith. For some reason, and reached over to my phone and tapped the voice memo app. I recorded a few minutes of our conversation before she fell asleep.

The recording is linked on the sidebar of this page, and you can listen to it here. Be ready for your feelings, as you hear her voice. Here is our conversation.

Nancy: ...you could say I'm willing myself to push myself a little harder every day, to, like, exercise, or eat when I really don't want to. So, it's more of a...it's fight, fight to me is a struggle. I'm fighting through something, I'm pushing through it, I'm fighting to live. I'm not fighting cancer, because you really can't fight cancer.

But then the faith, too, isn't like I have faith in the universe. My faith isn't going to make me live.  My faith is going to allow me to accept what cards I've been dealt. My faith is going to allow me to accept whether I'm going to live or I'm going to die. Because it's not heart-centered to just be 'I'm going to fight through this, and I'm going to live', and because of my faith, god is going to have me live. Because that may not be the case.

...And I don't think it's faith alone. I could sit here and have faith the universe is going to give me a million dollars, but unless I'm willing to work hard, that's not going to happen either. Like, faith requires action.

Tom: Yeah, I remember in my studies how...it seemed to me that finding faith had several levels, like the first level was just trusting something outside of yourself. And then the second level was taking action based on that trust. Because it's one thing to have that trust and keep it all inside, but behaving...as though you have that trust, and functioning in the outer world as though you have that trust, is a completely different level of expressing that faith.

N:  Well, you can even go to Catherine's statement on Stand & Deliver, because if the goal is creating the workshop, and/or the goal is beating cancer, one has to have a vision that one is going to be able to do that.  One has to have the vision to live, or the vision for acceptance....there's got to be a vision. And you've got to have some passion around life....and, you have to take action.  Like the action is taking the drugs, the action is using the sunblock, the action is getting sleep. On some level, the action is deciding where to take action and where to not take action. Because, I rested for two months, but I just got into a rut, staying in bed and doing the same thing over again.  I just felt like I was somewhat dying inside.  The one thing about working was that, and I don't want to push the working too much, because there is the down side of overdoing it, but actually starting to get engaged in my life takes my mind off of what I'm going through, and I felt more passionate about living. I was starting to feel not that much passion about living, because I felt like my existence was pretty narrow, or not that purposeful. That's even why, when I was in the hospital, I was taking all those coaching calls. My life needs some kind of purpose, and the whole purpose can't just be coupled around cancer. Like, you either choose to live with cancer, or you choose to have cancer.

T: Hmm, I don't understand. To live with cancer versus have cancer?

N: Well, it's either...does the cancer take over everything, or are you living a purposeful life with cancer?

So. Nancy lives in our hearts, after living a very purposeful life, and I am beginning to step into my new life and find my own purpose. My story belongs elsewhere, as it is no longer about Nancy. Unless I find more to say about her, or you do, this is my final NancyJonesUpdate. You can always reach me at tdc@alum.mit.edu.

With love and deep gratitude,

-tdc