After having spent the last four months traveling out of state to accompany my father to his doctor’s appointments about tumors and cancer and treatments and prognoses, I sat in yet another waiting room this morning to hear this time about my own tumor, with the spectre of cancer and treatments and prognoses threatening in the background.

As I was leaving my home, knowing I would have a difficult wait, without hesitation I grabbed my well-worn volume of Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth and Darcy would be the ideal companions for my time spent in the waiting room. I opened to Volume 3, Chapter 1 as I sat in the hospital, waiting to hear my name. I certainly could relate to the “high flutter” of Elizabeth’s spirits as they approached Pemberley, and I confess to envying Elizabeth’s easily remedied cause of distress. But I was soon able to forget about my own worries and tour Pemberley with Elizabeth, and smile as I watched her and Mr. Darcy meet again at last.

I began to think about Miss Austen and I. We both of us, at 41, have been confronted with our own mortality. I am quite confident that no one will be remember and mourn me 200 years hence, as they do Jane. But as mothers are apt to do, I thought most of my children, who at 8, 10 and 12 are much too young to lose their mother. Did Jane, as she began to realize she was not going to recover, think about her progeny, her writing? Did she mourn the books she would not be able to put to paper, and worry about the fate of her works already finished? Did she hope that someday Northanger Abbey, in spite of the Richards of the world, would be published? Did she want to know that someone other than herself would grow to like Emma? Did she worry that Anne and Captain Wentworth’s story would never be known outside her family circle?

I very much hope the radiologist is correct, and the word “benign” will be stamped on my chart, and the ending to this will be as happy as the endings of all of Jane’s novels. But if not, then perhaps I should pray that my own offspring would be as beloved and cherished as Jane’s have been.

(And perhaps I can use this to guilt Mags into quickly finishing The Mistress of Pemberley! )