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.

Apparently it's that time again

I wish I wanted to post here more. It seems like I always find myself wanting to look back on something that I feel I must have written about, and then find that I didn't.


Things have been okay. I've been dreaming a lot--daydreaming sometimes about this idea I've had for a while about becoming a counselor, and daydreaming a lot more about designing and building and sometimes even living in tiny houses of the variety that can fit on an 8x20' trailer, and be hauled around the country. I have such a love of efficient design, and of the idea of efficient living--living without the unnecessary accumulation of the mounds of stuff that perversely ensnare our affections and weigh down our lives without enriching them at all. More recently this has expanded to include the desire for a small, high mpg car. I'm tired of using up gas to lug around all this car that I'm not even using. I'm using the driver's seat and maybe the passenger's seat too, and yet I'm pulling the weight of both back seats and a trunk halfway full of crap that was left there by the family members who drove the car before it came into my hands.

Anyway, I've been funding the daydreaming by still working part time at that daycare I thought I had quit back in the spring, and doing some odd jobs for various people, mostly extended family members. I am tired of this, and I want to find doorways into something new, but I don't know where they are. And I don't know how to stop being afraid of committing to a plan.


And I love Christmas, and it's my favorite holiday, but I am tired, so tired of getting depressed every Christmas season. Back when I was with David (Oh Lord, his name is still like honey. Will that ever fade?) I thought that my issues at Christmastime were due to strife--some new one each year--within our relationship, but it doesn't seem to have changed. Or maybe it did, and maybe I am just in another doomed relationship and I can somehow feel it and it is hurting. I don't know. Was I sad like this last year? The year before? I can't remember. Lately I feel like I can't remember anything. And sometimes that's okay. Sometimes I feel like I just live in the present, I just am where I am, and maybe that's okay. But sometimes I feel this void where memories should be, and I feel like I am surrounded by nothingness, and it's a frightening thing. Obviously I don't exactly have alzheimer's, but I was listening to this radio special last night, and a man from Ireland was talking about his childhood Christmases, citing memory after memory after memory, and it was lovely--but I don't have that. I have a handful, but for the most part it's all a haze. Everything runs together. Why? Does that happen for everyone? Does everyone's mind feel like a chalkboard in the rain?


I admitted to myself tonight that I've been unhappy. It's been going on a while--weeks? Some months?--but I have not been seeing it. But sobbing on the floor (apparently that is my red flag of choice this past year or so) is difficult to ignore. So. Now what.

Quiet.

On the night after the one that found me kneeling and weeping with my face to the pavement at 3 am (I don't really have much to say about it*), I want to post something borrowed from a quiet and wonderful and dogged cancer-fighter blog-friend named Iikka:


"A Quiet Asana."

I will not be frustrated by lack of "progress."

I will take comfort and draw strength from the knowledge that I am well enough to maintain.

I will not hold myself to any standard, schedule, or expectations--my own or otherwise.

I will lean in, do the work, give to receive.

I will not counter pain with tension, anger, or fear.

I will accept the signals my body sends as it works to repair with kindness, peace, and understanding.

I will not complain, doubt, or question.

I will project patience, faith, serenity, and above all, gratitude.

I will not forget the gifts I have been given.

I will remember, every breath I take, that I.am.lucky.to.be.here.

No matter where here is: it is a gift, a blessing, and it is so much more than good enough.






































*I really don't. But just so no one goes jumping to conclusions about random muggings or anything else crazy, I feel like I should specify that it had a lot more to do with hormones and fatigue and frustration with the difficulty and the pain and the holy-hell-so-GD-confusedness of life than with anything else.