My friend talks into my ear when we walk the block in the dark. Our shoulders are touching, our steps synced. Her new job, it’s one of the heart: patient service rep at the local cancer center. I know the place—too well, really—from visits with a loved one.

We always joke that a lot of money flows into oncology, or ripples around those at death’s organized doorstep. Floor-to-ceiling windows, a glossy piano, cushy couches, handmade quilts, local art, a sliding-door meditation room, the biggest Christmas tree in town, and all the high-end Italian coffee a chemo stomach could tolerate. Even the toilet paper is extra fluffy. Light-flooded, this hope-drenched place. But it’s not all calm, my friend says.

Twice this week, a person spun through the gigantic glass doors. Refused to mask, of course. They threw translucent hands up toward the heavens and lamented the state of this world and the loss of liberties and wailed for common sense and individual rights. My friend bit her lip and followed protocol–we protect the vulnerable, it’s office policy, she said with her most innocent kid voice and smiling eyes. She slid a mask across the check-in desk, toward the patient’s blue-veined hands, and hoped they’d cooperate.

Tired, we amble through this unseasonably mild evening, and she concludes her week’s summary with this: she needs to find out from the supervisor where the staff panic button is, and she now knows at least two terminal cancer patients in our not-so-quiet-anymore city own and carry guns on their wasted frames. In the dark, my ear to her heart, I don’t know what to tell her. I think, though, my loved one’s next appointment might be virtual. I also contemplate, as I avoid puddles, what a loaded word terminal is.

In the morning, I prop myself up in bed and mull over the chickadees, sparrows, and junkos shouting life across the courtyard. They’ve gently but insistently coaxed me from tossed and tousled sleep, and now aria after aria echoes between the boxes we people have built. Chirrp, waak, trrrllll say their sage voices. It occurs to me that, in all their simplicity—eat, nest, rest, digest, fly plus announce danger, spring, sunrise, mating season with song—they live the same lives as they might have hundreds of generations ago, despite rapidly changing surroundings. Or vanishing surroundings. Humans, on the other hand, have carefully manicured the planters outside this window and designed concrete paths, vinyl siding on buildings, glass windows that open and close and can stun, even kill, anything that flies at them too rapidly—anything except for maybe a bullet. My species does not appear to grasp the magnitude of technology’s role in corrupting what used to be essential.

I wonder what life would be like for people who didn’t know they had cancer. Who didn’t have to deal with ports beneath papery skin, infusions of angry cocktails, scans in hard machines. Who weren’t turned into patients, or numbers on charts. Who didn't cope with side effects, expected and unexpected. Who didn’t watch frothing politicians on social media and absorb amateur explanations, founded or unfounded, of why the world is not turning as it should. Who didn’t stash cold weapons that, in a split second, could rob another being of its warm life. Who climbed strong branches and rocked with the sweet breeze. Who danced with holly leaves’ shadows and drank in the sunshine. Who merged the pulse of their blood with the rhythm of time. I wonder what it would be like if they just nestled under a canopy and sang the song of their life until it ended.