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Produced by the Island at WBUR Boston.

From The New York Times and WBUR Boston, this is Modern Love.

The New York Times

Stories of Love, Laws, and Redemption.

I'm your host, Megna Chacrabardi.

What does luck mean to you?

And does that change depending on your circumstances?

That's what Joyce Maynard writes about in this week's essay.

It's read by Jackie Weaver, who's been nominated for Academy Awards for her work in Silver Lining's Playbook and Animal Kingdom.

You can see Jackie this summer in the new series, Perpetual Grace Limited, on Epox.

On the opposite side, a family has gathered, a man in his early 60s, like me, and four young people around the ages of my children.

They're engaged in cheerful sounding small talk about their jobs, the red socks.

As for me, I don't feel like talking to anyone.

I arrived a little after 6am, after kissing my husband goodbye before they wheeled him into surgery.

The surgery is expected to take 12 hours.

Though somewhere around our three, the surgeon will have gotten to the place in Jim's abdomen where he can see the tumor.

Known to us only as an innocuous-looking grey area on Jim's CT scans.

Sometimes this turns out to be the moment when the surgeon discovers the tumor is not operable after all.

In which case they stitch everything up and say, we tried.

The tumor in question, I haven't allowed myself to call it Jim's tumor.

I don't want to see him take ownership.

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