In addition to being worried about Matt, the operation also made me worried about myself. If something that freakish and bad could happen to someone so young, who's to say the same wouldn't happen to me?
I knew the odds that I'd develop a head tumor of my own were infinitesimally small, but that wasn't what worried me. It was the "out-of-the-blue" factor that did it. The idea that you can be going about your business one day and all the while having something terrible growing inside you. I didn't want to be thinking about stuff like that, but as the operation got closer I couldn't help it.
It took my grandma to help me finally get over it. She was in her late 80s and was never one to hold back how she felt about anything. "Erin, when you're gonna go, you're gonna go. And that's it," she said, taking a long puff off her cigarette.
A simple idea, but one that helped me make sense of what was happening. Just like I couldn't control what was going to happen on the operating table with Matt, I couldn't control when my time would come by worrying and obsessing over it 24 hours a day.
