All my life wherever I have been, in whatever places I have found myself, I have felt like an outsider. And who hasnt? Every home is temporary and we are only transients. But I was not prepared for the irony I encountered now, that even as a patient in a cancer ward I would feel myself an outsider too. I looked at the women in their kerchiefs and wigs, and the men in the watch caps they donned to hide their baldness I took in their gray pallor and the dark looks of the family members who came to support them, and felt, I am not one of them. It was the false consciousness that had accompanied me my entire life. These tragedies happen to others. I am not one of them. Even as I entertained these thoughts, I recognized how selfdenying and ultimately absurd they were. None of us are outsiders. We are all going to the same destination. Though my recent ordeal was over and I could walk back into the sunlight and resume my interrupted life, I was not really out of there. I had been lucky, but I had not been given a pardon, only a reprieve. My father was right. Life is a cancer ward, and death is in our cells metastasizing every day
outsider, ward, selfdenying, metastasizing, cancer