Thursday, June 9, 2016

Oh.

Yesterday I was taking care of some cats for a friend of mine who has cancer, and I got a call from Ian. Turns out his mom--effectively my mother in law--has cancer. We thought at first that she might have had a stroke, but in fact she has an inoperable brain tumor. Naturally one of the first people I told was my good friend who recently had cancer. Got on facebook before writing this and at the top of my news feed was a post from a cousin who is fighting a long battle with cancer.

Guys, I'm getting real sick of cancer.

Thanks to aspirin in her system they can't biopsy until late next week, so for right now we're basically all trying and failing really hard to pretend that everything is still normal. We're all going forward with our original weekend plans, desperately gripping the illusion that we held so easily on Wednesday morning, and watching with rising panic as it dissolves into nothing.

I cried a lot yesterday.

Everyone is trying not to think about the radiation and chemo that will start next month, right after we come back from a week of pretend vacation at the beach. I am trying really hard not to think about how she might never hold the grandchildren that she wants so desperately to meet and love. There's talk of moving our wedding forward. She wants us to make sure we visit before her biopsy next week--the unspoken reason being that she fears she may never wake from it. This is the same cancer that killed her mother.


I don't know how to act. I'm not sure any of us do.