What now?

Maybe I have tried to let go of cancer. As if distancing myself could lessing the fears and anxieties that crash upon the shoreline of my waking daily trudgery. Maybe… That imagery may be appropriate as the ocean smooths jagged rock, with undetected force lets the passing of time change the very shape of our world. Perhaps it just takes time to let go.

I've not posted anything in almost a year. It's been weird. Cancer becomes such an encompassing majority of your everyday. Even when I am remission and it seems to fade in my mind, I cannot get away from it. My mother recently gave us all a scare. Thrown into that wonder of uncertainty again, this time I wondered if it was her time. With it comes not knowing how to react. What to do or not do. How to feel. Or should I try to burry it all and not feel.

If these are to be her final hours, can I put aside my own ego and focus on her? Before too long she could go, leaving my father. My father. A man from whom I learn emotion is the opposite of weakness. As much as I feel the need to put aside my own insecurities for my mother, I need to do the same for my father. A man who may be lost without my mother.

I love them both. Neither should have to suffer, either in death or in struggling to live afterwards.

I have never said this enough. I love you. And if I could take a few more years of that hell called chemo dripped into our veins, just to take it from you, to give you a few more years, years without that same hell, a few more healthy years with Dad, with my kids as they grow, with me, …I would.

But it doesn't work that way. I can't make it work that way. And I am sorry.

My mother once asked me, as she felt she was doing well while her friend was losing her battle, how to treat that friend. How do I sit there [in chemo] and look at her knowing she will not make it and I will? How do I treat her? My answer is vastly different now. Though I feel my advice was sound, I lack my conviction and fortitude of only a couple years ago. Because now it is my mother who may not reach the finish for which we all hope.

Mom, what do I say when I look you in the face, knowing I made it and you will not?



…I don't know.