Page 17 - Philly Girl

Philly Girl 1

Time Changes Everything

In early 2014, I was happy and healthy, a perky, dance–class-
going working girl, excited about my sons’ achievements in
love and career. Then I found myself facing a potentially life-
threatening diagnosis of lung cancer. That was quite a jolt.
When I was a child, I loved to write. What I would write
about most was time travel. The same themes would emerge.
I would go back in time, switch things around a little, and
create a vastly different outcome. These fantasies involved
things like choosing not to take the bus one day (which
exploded, but without me in it) or not getting up in time to
go to school (which would be blasted by a nuclear attack).
Or I might, in my story, introduce myself to someone on the
subway (not my normal shy self). And so on. Today I think
that I may have written these narratives in an attempt to
control one major “what if” outcome. What if the gunman
who shot and killed my grandmother when I was ten had
missed? What if he had gone somewhere else? What if he had
shot himself instead?
What would my life, and my family, have been like if I
had grown up without this tragic event? Here are the ques-
tions that haunt me:
Would my mother have been so unstable?
Would my father have pursued the writing career that
he had so longed for?
Would my sister have spent her high school years hidden
in the basement sleeping?