Dad and I had a lot of time to chat the other day. Normally, chatting with my father is an exercise in restraint, confusion, irritation, and not a little head-shaking. This mostly stems from our differences of opinion on the Internet...and Aprilaires. Oh, and that I don't consume a side of beef at dinner. Well, and that I call it "dinner" instead of "supper". Hmm...and that I prefer my vegetables completely unsullied by salt or butter. Oh, oh! And that, despite the 50% Norwegianism that I possess, I prefer coffee to crude oil in the morning.

Obviously, we have things we need to work through. Obviously...

But, we had a sort of kinship together in the waiting room...mainly because neither one of us made the coffee and he didn't have to pay for it...but also because we shared a love and a worry for the same woman. He was talking about his father, who passed away almost two years ago. He recounted a day, about a week after the funeral, when he took his mother to church. She left the building after service, and ran into an old friend. She stopped in the middle of the current of churchgoers making their exodus, and completely ignored my father as he sat in the van. It is an irritating personality quirk, but I wouldn't take her any other way.



So, Dad's waiting in the van for his mother. He's frustrated. He's mouthing epithets and waving hand gestures (one can only assume). All at once, a large cloud covered the sun and rain poured down out of nowhere. Grandma grabbed her head and rushed toward Dad in desperation. My father began laughing, looked at the sky, and replied, "Thanks, Dad."

She drank the contrast with a grimace. "This isn't going to stay down," she predicted. I returned to Gathering Blue, and tried to appear nonchalant. She talks to me more, confides in me more, when I appear nonchalant. I like the talking, the confiding. I knew the moment I saw her yesterday morning that Mom felt unwell. It created a vacuum of niceties; Dad and I set our jaws and kept our gaze forward. She doesn't like the attention. She's been in pain. She doesn't like the noticing.

After the scan, we sat in the oncology waiting room, the three of us. Dad and I sipped coffee. He people-watched, I read. Mom stretched across three waiting room chairs situated in a row...the sitting being too much to bear. We had a long time to wait. Every now and then, one of us would make a benign comment. "The construction is really coming along." "It isn't as busy as it normally is here." Little nudges to remind us of the humanity amidst the antiseptic air. Then, in a quiet voice, mom asked us to follow her when she was called back.

This was a big deal. There is only one other time that Mom has allowed people back to the oncologist's exam room...I was not home then. It was that fateful day last June—Mom still has the appointment notification slip in her wallet—when time became endangered. She said she knew when he came in the room that day that it hadn't been a good scan...and indeed, it had not. Asked if she'd like him to break the news to Dad and Charlie, she nodded gratefully, and they were brought back to the room—to hear the ugliness, receive grief counseling, and think of infinity against a ruler of months. I was to receive the news via phone, from 1200 miles away. A return to Wisconsin was in the works within 24 hours.

She typically likes getting the news herself, coping with it on her terms, then telling us. We afford her this right, imagine away the gnawing hunger to know everything as soon as it is there to know. We can't give her much...but we can give her her dignity. Yesterday, her preference for private counsel was negligible. She knew what was coming. We all knew what was coming. She was saving a nurse a trip back to the waiting room to call my father and me back. We were all on the same page, though reading to ourselves. "Weeks...." We were expecting them to give us mere weeks. The suffering has been evident.



But such tidings did not come. We sat in that small exam room...dad sipped coffee, looked around...I sipped cappuccino, read...Mom fidgeted on the table, gave in, and reclined to seek a release from the pain. It hurts her to be awake...and she's too uncomfortable to sleep. Constant fatigue and discomfort: this has been her reality. Dr. Holen came through the door on jaunty step and said, "It was a good scan!" Huh? How is this possible? The tumors still grew...but by tenths of a centimeter...much reduced rate of growth. The pain though, what is the pain? They don't know.

We left the hospital after nine hours. We were weary with the waiting. (accidental alliteration) Mom held a prescription for morphine in one hand, and the overnight pack of chemo over the other shoulder. I'm about ready to write off this whole concept of logic. I don't understand how a perfectly strong, in-shape, prime-of-her-life woman of 46 can go in for a routine physical to find that she has end-stage cancer—and at 48, she suffers constantly, knows ever-present exhaustion, and her cancer is slowing in growth. I don't think any of us really know what to think. She caught me sixish weeks ago crying quietly at her bedside. I was jobless, husbandless, and—I was sure in no time at all—I would be motherless as well—the next day's scan would prove it, of this I was certain. I, myself, was feeling like a cancer. My powers of prediction proved wrong with that scan, too...I suppose it is a lesson. We're not meant to grasp the live wire of a timeline.

Just a boring picture. Some of you like pictures. Well, actually, judging from emails, a lot of you like pictures, and a lot of you wanted to see a picture of my father as of late. That's him there on the right. Your right, not mine. As my pictures page is buried and majorly outdated (I think the "newest" picture is from last March!) I will dot the occasional post with an image until I decide what to do with the lackluster page. Click on the image if you like—be warned that it'll pop out and enlarge without your consent.

It's strange how the death of a relationship mimics the impending death of a disease. Early on, my mother and I observed the link, the sameness in our hurt. She said, "Sometimes I look in the mirror and think, 'Who are you?' Sometimes you wonder if you'll ever see yourself there again." I understand perfectly. I deluded myself thinking that it was the backdrop that was off, the backdrop that colored everything a shade of wrong. It was an easy assumption to make. I would spend long minutes staring at my reflection, never seeing myself at all. Only death, desertion, loneliness.

I wasn't seeing myself because I wasn't looking at myself. I say all the time that it isn't what happens to you that makes a good life, but how you react to what happens to you. Unfortunately, all of my quaint little philosophies crawled to an unreachable shelf in the beginning, there. They gave me my space, allowed me free range to go slightly mad with the process. All suffering is not bad. People tiptoe around pain, trying to avoid it at all cost. They do themselves a grave injustice, for only from the greatest misery can be born the greatest joy.



It was as though I slept for six weeks straight after Miles skipped town. I could not bear the nourishment of food or the refreshment of water. I lived in a vacuum of disillusionment, and I stared at blank walls, daring them to cave in around me. I am certain that my loved ones looked upon my pathetic form and mourned, "She isn't strong enough to survive this." Strength is a funny concept we humans have. With hundreds of contrasting definitions on its figurative page, I think it's safe to say that strength is something that you have to shape to fit your own heart, and only then can you wield it.

It wasn't my husband's leaving that hurt so deeply—but rather, my friend's betrayal...and that will always ache. But, I can accept this—I can accept that not all memories have to pass a rigorous assessment of goodness and warmth to be inducted into the banks of my recollection. But mostly, I can accept that misery really is as valuable to me as joy. I need them together, or both depreciate. I am stronger for it. I am stronger for letting the wretchedness take me to the edge...because it wasn't until I made it there that I realized that I didn't want to jump.

And all at once my world was saturated with brilliant hues again. Life is really what you make of it. This year, I am entering the Christmastime festivities with a very different outlook than I had last year.

It was in the second week of December, 2004, that the oncologist told Mom that if they didn't find an effective treatment, her prognosis was only two years. Miles spent the holiday in Colorado with his family, an event which, sadly, I missed because I felt an indescribable certainty that I needed to be with my mother last Christmas. It was a glum month, a glum holiday. Basically, it sucked. There was this heavy cloud of sorrow hanging over us...and even smiles seemed strained. "Is this our last Christmas together?" Every action, every word, was laced with the silent question. It hung upon the humidity of the emotion-clogged air and threatened to suffocate.

This year—my God—this year, we are on borrowed time with Mom. "Three months" came due at the end of August...we are at the end of December. Miles is no longer in my life—leastwise not in the same context. Yet, this year, the rapture pours over, and my heart has let flood my body with it. My eighth grade English teacher always told us that we weren't human beings, but rather, human becomings. I pray that I never stop becoming. I looked in the mirror a few weeks ago...and I saw an old friend: myself.