A few months ago, we started watching Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies with Neige and The Prophet.  The director’s cut is on Netflix, which means that once you start watching, the series lasts forEVER.  That last movie is a never-ending battle. But the visuals and emotions and story hold up very well, and you have not seen an Ork until you’ve seen a Peter Jackson Ork. And let’s not even get started on the Elves, except to say that we all want to marry Legolas and Arwen now.

The movies are about so many things, and one thing they are about is how much we love home. In a funny way, London, Ontario, has come to remind me of The Shire. It’s a sweet, safe community full of little houses and little gardens. Everywhere you go you tend to run into someone you know. And when you leave, you know you are in a different – and perhaps more exciting and special – place. Like Paris or Toronto or Bethesda, Maryland.

We weren’t watching LOTR in preparation for anything, mind you. We were just looking for something to watch, especially as the kids had recently been introduced to Dungeons and Dragons, and the LOTR world seemed right for them. In the movies, a comforting and peaceable world is ripped apart by senseless violence, and humble Frodo somehow becomes the one chosen to bear the burden of The Ring so that it can be destroyed and order restored to the world.

Then in October, I learned quite suddenly that I was going to need surgery because my cancer had progressed unchecked, so I dove in and had the surgery, well-supported by a cast of wonderful family and friends. And I came out of the surgery in good shape. But I realized: Shit, I still have The Ring.

I sat through those movies on the couch. I’m not going to lie, I slept through plenty of scenes. But scene after scene, poor Frodo carried that stupid ring. It got heavier and heavier for him, and his friends propped him up and helped him put one foot in front of the other. He learned to trust the equally abject Gollum so that he could continue on the journey, and he never rejected the stupid mission of carrying that ring to Mt. Doom to destroy it. In the end, he succeeded in destroying the ring, a monumental task that made the happy and wished-for ending seem like a dream or a pretend afterlife.

Sometimes it helps to have a metaphor to communicate what you are experiecing, it can fill out the details when you don’t want to. So one morning I mentioned the ring to The Prophet, and he got really excited. “Yes!” he said, “The Ring! Because you agree to carry the Ring, but you don’t know about all the other stuff that’s going to come with it. You don’t know that there will be monsters and a giant spider.”  The giant spider that menaces you in the semi-darkess is the reality.

This week the giant spider is that we found out yesterday that I am to have my ovaries out on Monday. We’re hoping it will be laparoscopic, that the recovery will be easy, that our holidays will still be enjoyable. It’s the reasonable thing to do – what do you need ovaries for when you have two awesome kids? – and the gynecological surgeon is excellent, so I’m in good hands, once again.  It’s just the giant spider behind the Ring.