Inspiring words

With her permission, I am sharing here an excerpt from a message I received from our friend Aviva, an amazing woman we have known since she, Barry, and I were undergraduates and her husband was a medical student at the University of Rochester in the early 1970s. You may recall that Aviva won first prize in my earlier contest for the best quip after I fell and needed stitches during my treatment for CNS lymphoma (“you needed that like a hole in the head”):

We are blessed with intelligence and analytic abilities.  And we are blessed to know and have access to the best doctors and eminent scientists.  So we go about problem-solving looking to arrive at the perfect - or at least the most optimal - solutions to our problems.

But alas, after all that hard work of "discovery," we find that no matter how much information we amass, it is not enough information.  For what we need is a crystal ball, and those are in short supply.

It is very humbling.  It makes us realize that, ultimately, we are in G-d's hands. 

You did your part.  You have amassed an amazingly smart and competent and thoughtful team to help you through this new journey.  

During this calm before the next storm, so to speak, we snuck out this afternoon to see a movie, “The Big Sick.” I know, this sounds depressing, but then we read Manohla Dargis’ review in the New York Times who described “a joyous, generous-hearted romantic comedy that, even as it veers into difficult terrain, insists that we just need to keep on laughing,” we had to go see it.

The movie focuses on a Pakistani-American young comedian, Kumail (played by Kumail Kanjiani) whose parents are desperately trying to find him a suitable wife, setting him up with a series of lovely young Pakistani women. But life becomes complicated when he meets and falls in love with Emily (Zoe Kazan), a fact which he is simply unable to bring himself to share with his parents. This causes a painful break-up of the young couple, but life takes a strange turn shortly thereafter when Emily becomes ill and mysteriously lapses into a coma. While the doctors are trying to determine just what is causing her illness, Kumail spends much of his time at her bedside, gradually forming a relationship with her parents. Eventually the cause of her illness is determined and they are able to bring her out of the coma. 

But she remembers only the young man who had left her, and their road back together is not entirely smooth. Still, I will tell you what all the reviews share, that there is in fact a happy and very sweet ending. This really was a charming movie, just the sort of thing we needed right now. I definitely recommend it if you have a chance.

Have a good week. I promise to keep you all posted as the journey continues.

Love,

Rebecca