I called a man I didn’t know. The reason doesn’t matter. When no one answered, I left a message, but not before hearing the cleverest recorded invitation I’ve ever encountered. It ended with the words:

You leave it, I’ll retrieve it.

I did connect with the fellow a day later,  but he said that a meeting between us would have to wait until he returned from Europe. He died soon after his trip home. The six-word sentence had transformed into a non-sequitur, an illogical request given his demise.

He could no longer “retrieve it.” He had “left” the message and all else. Whatever remained would have to be retrieved by someone other than this person, divided among his heirs, or thrown away. One hopes those words were not his last for those he cared about.

The stranger had a prolonged bout with cancer and defeated it, or at least knocked it to the ground for a long while. Some cancers enter remission, partial or complete. These multi-formed monsters can be tricky devils, pushed to the mat and unconscious after they have been drugged out or cut out. Time passes. If they spring up with renewed strength, the disease has been known to take no prisoners, sweeping a life away as if it were a breadcrumb on the dinner table.

I have lost friends and relatives in this way, but have dodged the menace myself. It remains unimaginable to me. Of course, I can try to imagine it, but there must be a difference between thinking of it from the outside and living the invasion from the inside.

We don’t own complete awareness, not even those who have overcome it. I have suffered close to unendurable physical pain for other reasons, but I lack the words, the memory, and the feelings to describe those episodes even to myself. The capacity to retrieve past agonies in visceral form would ruin most futures. Recreating them in full would poison time.

I do know the fear of its return remains for many who have survived cancer. A different thing from anguish, but by itself, terrifying.

We all watch children whose joy is without such concerns. Those with loving parents, good health, and food on the table live in innocence, free of life’s terrible possibilities. The kids are like Adam and Eve before they ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Their bodies flip, leap, bounce, spin, laugh, and smile.

God bless them.

If I could, I would wave a magic wand and make this simple purity permanent.

I helped adults and teens achieve better lives, but magic was not my specialty then and is not now. If it were, two boys — my grandchildren — would be first in line to benefit from my prestidigitation.

Love is a wonderful experience, but innocence — the opposite of nightmarish disease — cannot be rendered in words or memory. We watch the wonder of our children’s joy and are filled with gladness.

Perhaps that is what remains of innocence past childhood.

A gift for us, too.

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A Small Car For Kids by ekstrazabawki.pl, sourced from Wikimedia Commons.