Embracing Imperfection

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned the hard way that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end.” — Gilda Radner

I didn’t just want a perfect ending; I wanted a perfect everything. Perfect house and job and vacations. Perfect body and hair and skin. Perfect relationships and friendships and family. Perfect marriage and kids and pets. It took a cancer diagnosis for me to loosen my white-knuckled grip on a bunch of uncontrollable things. No matter how tightly I clutched the steering wheel, I found myself powerless over the most basic aspect of life: Living it.

I started to consider: If I’m dead, will it matter if my house is clean? For 28 years of keeping a dwelling — apartment, condo, and finally house — I’ve cultivated a clean, cozy, welcoming environment. This not only meant candles and blankets and books, it also meant dusting around the candles every day, folding the blankets 15 times a day, and organizing the books by color. Curating a kitchen for gathering and laughter also meant wiping the counter tops 47 times a day and constantly using the stick vacuum (#1 pandemic purchase) to keep animal fur and crumbs at bay. But when my treatments left me zapped, I realized that I spend most of my time making our house look a certain way and very little time enjoying this carefully curated environment. Honestly, if I die…