by Holly Mott

Oh, Mary. I know you mean all the best in asking what I plan to do with my one wild and precious life. Today however, your words feel like a provocation. My resilience has been waning you see. My optimism has been feeling a little less accessible of late. I’ve been experiencing a phenomenon for the last few months, it’s hard to explain but I’ll try. I liken it to what it must feel like when you’re down in a bunker hiding out from a storm. It’s small in that bunker, no light, no noise, no word from the outside. It’s simple in there. You are safe, you are dry, you have food, you are alive. When the storm passes and it’s time to walk up and out into the world again, you rise along the steps and open the hatch and much to your shock and dismay, all is not right with the world. Your house is gone. The garden is in ruins. A tree has fallen on your car. Everything has changed, everything is different, and yet down there it seemed all was going to be okay. When the goal was to survive, nothing more, you were so successful. Mission accomplished. But now what? All that supported you in this life, everything that brought you comfort and that felt familiar is gone. It’s just you that made it through, you and your one wild and precious life.

For the last four years I have had one job—stay alive. To fulfill that mission, I’ve had to make changes along the way. I’ve had to make my life smaller, easier to manage, simply so that I could take the best care of myself and survive the repeated assaults on my body by this disease and its treatments. Next month will be one whole year since my last treatment and I am stable, I am healthy, I am alive. It’s time to climb those stairs, make my life bigger again. It’s time to expand and take on and get back to living. But there’s wreckage up here it turns out. My life has been leveled by the storm and I hardly recognize it.

The marriage, nay—the great love—is over. The beloved home we shared now belongs to another family, this one healthy, married, and employed. The hard-won career is lost. That one year “self-funded sabbatical” is now a four year gap in a 50-year-old woman’s career and the only way to explain it is to reveal the risk she is as an investment, because to tell the story of those lost years is to admit that she may get sick again, any minute now. The six figure salary with the five figure bonuses is a distant memory. As is the retirement account, the home equity, and the savings.

My one wild and precious life has been my full-time job to protect. And I’ll admit that the preciousness of it has at times felt a luxury, a bit boujee even. How weird is that? The simple acts of feeding myself and getting adequate rest and exercise have taken up most of my days this last year. I’ve done a good job. I have, I know this. And now I’m looking for that old resilience that has always kept me going, through parenting in poverty, through the early grunt work of a delayed career, through the marriage woes, and the troubled teen. That resilience that has always brought me hope and has always fueled my next act. I want to rise to this occasion, grab the various bulls by their horns and get ‘er done. Get a job, find a partner, make a difference. But I find I’m still standing here on the steps of my bunker, looking out at the wreckage. I’m a bit in shock. Yeah, it’s all a bit much. Oh, Mary. What do I plan to do with my one wild and precious life? I’ll start by believing I have a say in the matter.

Holly Mott has been writing with Spirit of the Written Word since 2023. She has been living with Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma since her diagnosis in 2018. Holly lives in Florence, Massachusetts.