Well, its been a week… and despite my initial fear of it being intolerable waiting, like everything else one endures on this journey called life, it just normalized. I managed to keep my boys as distracted and amused as I could. Homework was still done, errands were still run, meals were made, conversations held. It seems anything can be become quite normal, and that humans are very resilient. But in the quiet of the morning, staring here at this page, tomorrow lurks like the last bastion of hope and the ultimate crushing blow of despair.
He has, by the initial diagnosis, a fast growing stage three large cell carcinoma, a relatively rare lung cancer. It tends to slough off cells, and can spread by the bloodstream. But he reacted relatively well to the chemo and radiation he got, and if it has shrunk and not spread, he agreed to round two of chemo. Tomorrow we find out the results.
We had a nice fire in the fireplace last night, ate leftover corned beef on pumpernickel bread, watched “House” reruns, and worked on Jake’s Christmas list. Normal, normal, normal. We went over our AFLAC bill, trying to decide what to shed and what to keep, since his boss isn’t paying the freight on that anymore… hmm… how much can we pay AFLAC out of the AFLAC money, when they still owe us 2 AFLAC checks from a month or more ago? Quack, quack. I’ve 4 ignored utility bills staring me down in my inbox every time I boot my email. Heh. I guess THAT part is normal.
I cannot imagine losing this man, this warrior this way. He pretty much raised me, I feel, because most of what I am, I became as a result of meeting him at 21. From the first instant I laid eyes on him, I knew. My instincts have always been amazingly prescient about “keepers and kindreds” in my life, but this was like a cosmic explosion of rightness. The road has not always been smooth, but all relations take work. Our psyches are intertwined in ways no one would ever understand.
Who would I be without my anchor? Would I become harder, more self-reliant as he taught me, when I was still a floundering “victim” type? Would I become softer, more forgiving of others, and revert to a more “doormat” (as he liked to call it) state? He tends to be a loner, and I the social one.
Which leads me to the place of the real questions… it needn’t be tragedy that is the impetus of change… what would I really like to change about myself, and why am I not working toward that now?