Marilyn Muses
On Life, Cancer, and other stuff
I Am Not Comfortable in My Body
There’s an old photo of me by the white picket fence in front of our house when I was about 5 years old — I wore a pair of peddle pushers, now known as capris. They were black...
The Tarot Card of Strength
When I was diagnosed with cancer, in March 2020, I kept hearing “you got this” “you are the strongest person I know” and “you’ll make it through”. While that’s all true, It’s...
Trust in the Garmin
It was somewhere in the 1990’s when my husband and I bought our first Garmin navigational system. We plugged It into the space for the cigarette lighter (now called the USB...
Gears, Bells, and Whistles
Growing up in our house on East 9th Street in Brooklyn, we had a desk that fit in the corner of our dining room - a caddy corner desk of white oak that I enjoyed sitting under. I...
Angels Among Us
When I was a child, the NYC public school system had something called release time on Wednesday afternoons. We would leave school at 2:00 and go for religious instruction. I was...
Out of the Cage
Sometime during the spring of 2021 I felt a protruding lymph node near my groin, the spot where lymphoma started over 2 years ago. I called my oncologist right away and they...
Marilyn Muses in ‘Coping With Cancer’ Magazine
Marilyn Zagha-Keeshan
Cancer and Me
My birthday is in July but on March 26, 2020, my life started anew when I was diagnosed with cancer. Learning to live with that is an entirely new life experience. I...
A Coincidence in Dates
As I was looking at my upcoming appointments at Memorial Sloan Kettering, I noticed something amazing, something that has a constant impact on my life in both physical and...
The Weight of Life
My mother’s ongoing weight issues led her to go to Weight Watcher’s when I was about 12 years old. Her sister’s, also overweight, made fun of her for paying money to lose weight....
Coming Out of the Closet
It’s been 11 months after chemotherapy and stem-cell transplant, My hair is growing back, thinner and finer, and I am 60 pounds lighter. I go from feeling energetic and...
Challenges
Part 1- Living When I was a teen, my mother wanted me to train to be a secretary, get a job, and find a nice businessman...
Here, I can fix it
My Dad was a person who was able to fix just about anything. He was able to look at a broken machine or household gadget that was malfunctioning and know exactly what was...
The Quilt of Life
Handmade quilts are fascinating to me; the combinations of patterns, colors, and designs are so intricate and precise. Each individual piece of fabric — and there are...
Before and After
The Life of Brian first aired in 1979. It’s a Monty Python movie, so it has a unique interpretation of events that took place in Biblical times; the retold story is...
Mom and the Firefighter
In January 2019, a firefighter fell to his death on the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn, responding to a crash. He was trying to climb over the barriers that separate the eastbound and...