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Elephant Ignored

I had not heard from R in a few weeks when I received a text from her saying that they had found a lump in her breast and it needed to be looked at. She went on to chat about other things - her kid's upcoming move to freshman dorm in college, a vacation she and her husband were going to take right after. I took my cue from her and moved on to topics apart from the lump. 

She went quiet for days after than and as much as I wanted to check in on her, I did not want to enquire about the elephant in the room. I summoned up the courage to check in on her and got a response back immediately - she was glad I was checking in to see if all was well but what well means is debatable in such situation. How good or bad is the prognosis is one part of it but how ready R is to deal with that fact is another thing. 

 A few more weeks have passed since that time and we have stayed in touch but avoided the question that must drive most of what she does going forward. I don't know if I am ready to deal with reality because for now I have the safe space of not knowing. Maybe R wants to keep it that way. For now, I want to treat my friendship with R as a gift that suddenly turned into a very finite thing on borrowed time. I want to make our conversations count and  do simple things together that we had both postponed for another time. 

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