I have started 2014 in the throes of a relapse that has dogged my heels through­out the fall. When I see my oncologist this month, we will be dis­cussing treat­ment and, presumably, starting it soon thereafter.

Because the relapse is steadily increasing and my energy and overall health are steadily diminishing, we spent the holidays qui­et­ly. (Well, quietly after my hus­band finished five rehearsals and five performances in the space of three weeks.) When coworkers ask what I did for Christ­mas, I smile and say “nothing.” They think I am joking.

Similarly, when they ask me what I resolve for 2014, I give the same reply. I am not one to make New Year's resolutions. If I could not make life changes during the course of the year, why should I think there is any magic to making them now?

It is appropriate that the first month of our calendar is named after the Roman god Janus. Janus was al­ways represented as having two faces looking in opposite directions. To the Romans, he was the god of gates and doors, doorways, beginnings and endings, and transitions.

New Year is both a beginning and an ending, a transition from then to now. Janus is a powerful symbol as to where I am at the start of 2014.

Treatment is a doorway, a step from my current ill health into the unknown. My hope is that treatment will be a gateway to feeling better and to pushing the myeloma into a quiescent state once again.

Only time will tell. I don’t know what treatment will bring, so I do not yet know what the year may hold on the medical front.

I don’t know what door Janus is opening, but I do not fear it. Despite the treatment uncertainty, I am not dour on the prospect of 2014. Ebenezer Scrooge denounced this time of year as "a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer." My health may be in shambles and I am certainly not an hour richer, but I am no Scrooge. The year before me is endless in opportunities.

Two centuries ago, the sage Hillel said, "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am for myself only, then what am I? And if not now, when?" I have had that quote committed to memory for decades. I take that saying out now and hold it up against this time of year, against endings and beginnings, against old and new, against transitions and doorways to the future.

There is a moving scene in the novel I Heard the Owl Call My Name, by Margaret Craven. The key character, a young priest dying of cancer, has been killed in a landslide and the Canadian tribal village he serves has gathered to await the return of the body. There is only one other white man in the village, a government-hired teacher who hates his assigned post. As the villagers hear the canoes coming up the river, the children run down the path to the river­bank. The embittered teacher “heard the running footfalls on the path to the riverbank, and he went quickly to the door and could not open it. To join the others was to care, and to care was to live and to suffer.”

Opening a door is a magical act, as that poor teacher never found out. A door separates you from “here” and “somewhere else.” There is that wonderful, hold-your-breath moment in the 1939 “Wizard of Oz” when Dorothy opens the sepia farmhouse door to see the Technicolor of Oz outside.

Regardless of where the door is, or what it is, we all choose to open the door at one time or another in our life. I am standing before such a door now as I face the resumption of treatment. Sometimes opening the door does mean caring and living and suffering. Sometimes it means dying. Sometimes it is just a door.

And sometimes we step into Oz.