May 2006

It’s Friday night, and my heart is doing a modest dance of joy—Mom is home from the hospital, finally. We did the intake interview with hospice this afternoon, a lot of which was a repeat of the meeting we had earlier in the week; I found myself a little impatient at their chattiness, but I guess it comes with the territory. She and Dad and I spent the rest of the day hanging out in the living room, talking, eating dinner together, and except for the 800-lb. gorilla sitting in the room, it was just like before. I’ve decided to just feed him bananas for now, since it’s clear he won’t be leaving.

Tomorrow my brother comes over, and while it will no doubt be a great visit, there is now this little voice that always whispers to me, “Is this the last _______________?” around lots of things, and it’s a little louder as I try to decide whether or not to go home on Tuesday as originally scheduled. I miss my own life too, as important as it feels right now to be here, and the question of how flexible work can really be also looms a bit. But those are things to think about tomorrow. Right now it’s time to read and try to get myself to sleep.

This little piece really struck a chord yesterday. I was reading something else earlier, which said something to the effect that when you lose a loved one, you mourn not so much the person lost, but the loss of a loving mirror on your own life. As I work through the whole gymnastics routine, practicing my moves, that rings true—the saddest moments I’ve had so far are when I contemplate not being able to share my life, all the big events and small, as I’ve been able to do for nearly 40 years. We all learn to be our own mirrors to some degree, I guess, through these kinds of life passages, but it’s hard to lose that big picture of my whole life. And that’s the “me, me, me” of it all for tonight. It looks like she’ll be coming home the day after tomorrow, and that’s enough cause for celebration at the moment.

So, the wait is over. And the results are what we feared—the cancer remains active, and remission (and therefore the transplant) is no longer possible. It’s taken me a week to write these words; right now I’m sitting in my parents’ living room listening to Dad fill in my brother on the daily “how’s Mom” report. I’ve been in Washington for nearly a week, seen my mother in two different hospitals, packed up all their stuff and moved it across Puget Sound, and spent a lot of time thinking and crying.

Last week (that seems so long ago!) Dad and I talked about the idea of “turning the corner” in regard to the acceptance of such abrupt and crushing news. And I like the concept a lot, but I feel like I keep turning the corner and then forgetting things and having to go back around. The five stages of grieving are an emotional gymnastic routine that has to be repeated every minute and with infinite variations: acceptance does a backflip into denial with a perfectly-stuck landing on anger.

And in the meantime, we are drawing tightly together, learning the ropes of soon-to-be absence, trying to remember to breathe, and finding what joy we can in whatever time is left. There are times when I can pretend it’s still 9 months ago, that we’re just finding out about leukemia, and that there is still hope for a cure. And then when I wake up from that moment back to the present, grief takes my breath away every time. As with so many things, the anticipation is almost worse than the event.

We pray for safe, calm, loving passage; for the strength to make it possible; for healing and remembrance and celebration of an amazing life. We turn a new corner every minute of the day, and it’s beautiful, sad, scary, intimate, and exhausting.