This morning while brushing my teeth I discovered a small, irate monster dwelling in my breast: guilt. I'd heard of so-called "survivor's guilt" but until that moment didn't realize I'd been mired in it.

It's useless to try to describe, even though I love to write, I love to come to a point or make a point and feel well-expressed. It's simple: I feel guilt. I feel guilt no matter how hard I work, how correctly I conduct myself, and especially when I'm not over-working, when I know I could be doing more or better. I feel guilt sometimes (but not always) when I'm going about my business - when I'm telling my mother I'm taking an embroidery class next Monday. What right do I have to make plans, to rub the point in further that I have a life to move on to while my father does not?

I visit my parents this afternoon after the girls I babysat have been picked up by their mother. My mom tentatively feels me out for coming back over at 3:30 to sit with my father while she gets her hair done. I support my mom having time away so much that I'd probably do just about anything to help her acquire it.

So this means instead of coming home and letting my kids play with the new toy I bought them (yay pizza!) while I lie down or take a bath or even sew a little, instead I will come home and take care of my children's needs quickly then bike back over there and sit with my father and watch him struggle to breathe. This is a decidedly less pleasant affair than watching someone struggle to breathe who is going to recover. This is watching someone over a period of days slowly be strangled, but there's a lot of free time to say stupid things like, "Can I get you a cup of coffee?" but mostly just sit and feel so completely ineffectual and feel like it's your fault. True story.

When you are supporting people who are experiencing a loss people will tell you "it must mean so much to them" and "they know you are there and it gives them peace", but I have no particular knowledge that in any way my presence, my hugs, my deliveries of food or juice or water, my talk, my silence, my prayers do any good at all. I know they comfort my mother; she tells me this. I know in no way if I help my father, at all.

If I wasn't pressed for time I'd write more: that the idea of "help" is selfish (there is very little I can do), the idea of "guilt" is selfish (it's all about me!). The concept of being present, while your loved one suffers and dies, is all I can do, and sometimes it's hard to do even that.

Break time is over. Time to get going back.

Labels: babysitting, cancer, illness, the Ghost of Christmas Bastard

Are we dying, or are we really living?

Last night we had a very small gathering which was only in part about my mother's birthday. I made a cake; or rather, I made the best frosting ever, and fucked up the cake on eighteen levels, and Ralph saved the day with his amazing cake re-animator skills, and it turned out an *awesome* cake. We dressed the kids up nice and packed up the birthday gift and homemade card and headed to meet family.

My father's brother and sister had arrived in town to stay at my parents' house hours after the piano has been moved and minutes after an adjustable bed (complete with oscillating air mattress to forestall bedsores), wheelchair, and oxygen tank had been installed. My mother hadn't been happy at first when it dawned on her my dad wasn't well enough to go out to dinner (the original plan). So after a talk with me on the phone she decided to pick up dinner. Now I'm in the living room talking to my aunt and uncle, the kids crawling on everyone, Ralph fixing my aunt and I a cocktail, and my mother nervously chopping up a salad. She's feeling glad for my family's help yet somehow "responsible" for everyone's food, good time, and happiness. P.S. her influence is something I struggle with daily - being a hostess, but not taking on The Weight Of The World by doing so, either.

My dad sits quietly. Sometimes his head is in his hands. Sometimes he smiles. He joins in the conversation then sinks away. We ask if he needs more medicine. After he has a coughing fit that lasts a while, Nels approaches his knee gravely and tells him to drink his water.

After dinner the kids are absolutely obsessed with the electric bed that's not in the living room. I tell them after dinner, wash hands, let us make it up, then you can get in. In tucking in sheets and sorting out pillows I realize I am making up my own father's deathbed. Sometimes I get these dramatic sentences, they pop in my head. But it doesn't need to feel bad. Why not a deathbed? I remember us making up my bed for my son's delivery, at home. This was an occasion too of worries, of expectation, of the unknown. The more time I spend at my parents' home the more similar and deep the experiences of birth and death seem to me. It's not even as simple as one event is joyous and the other sad, although I know so many see it that way.

The kids are in the bed, giggling. Nels says he's "dying", sticks his tongue out, dramatically falls back in bed. Sophie manifests a convincing consumptive cough. Ralph ministers to them by pouring out "medicine" (Diet Coke!) in a teaspoon. They love this. They cuddle-wrestle. My mother moves the bed into different positions. Nels snaps to this concept and when my mother leaves he immediately finds and operates the bed control. She returns, scolds him. He is banished from the bed for the evening.

This morning my mom arrives on the bike to deliver some leftover baked sweets that came into her life. People bring food to her home and it is appreciated, so very much, although I think people (including myself) may be bringing a few too many sweets - at least in the days when it's just my mom and dad in the house. But food doesn't go to waste around here. For instance, I made her a pie last week from fresh-picked berries (actually I made three, gave them to various and sundry) and she was able to take it to church and share it, something I knew gave her satisfaction.

I don't mean to go on about food. My mother's mood this morning is almost elated, girlish. She has somehow escaped hostess duties for a little bit of exercise, a drop-in visit bearing gifts. She hugs the children and cuddles the youngest chick before revealing what's probably really got her happy: "David slept really well tonight," she tells me (they had both slept poorly the night before). "He only woke up coughing once and I gave him some oxygen. I think that bed really helped."

Life (death) will get difficult again. But last night our family gathering - interrupted with a welcome and sweet visit from two friends bringing, yes, pies and singing two-part "Happy Birthday" - wasn't co-opted by maudlin experiences of sickness and dying, even as we were in the presence of such and indeed had gathered because of it.

Labels: cancer, death, family life, food, Grazdma, illness, tenderness, the Ghost of Christmas Bastard

It's almost as if I've achieved a well-orchestrated balancing act and despite my veteran status it doesn't take much to knock me off kilter. Yesterday a specialist in Seattle changed the assessment of my father's lifespan from "months to years" to "weeks to months". Hearing this today, sitting in the living room with him as he lies on the couch suffering, the worst thing is that sometimes it seems he's dead already, that the cancer or Death is larger and bigger than the moment we have. I feel double-robbed, robbed now, robbed in the future and soon.

Moments like this are the worst because they take away the most powerful truth we can live in, the moment, something we can agree on regardless of spiritual beliefs or lack thereof - something I tell myself daily and am starting to tell others:

Breathe, you are alive.

Labels: cancer, sorrows, the Ghost of Christmas Bastard

After a pretty kickass dinner made especially for Ralph and my dad (meatloaf, mashed potatoes, pain de champagne, salad with marinated green beans, olives, and blanched beets), my little family biked / walked a few blocks to our annual Relay for Life. The Relay - or as we OG residents call it, the Cancer Run - is a pretty big deal here in Grays Harbor (yearly we are in the top ten nationally for monies raised per capita). My kids are awesome: they are up for anything, any time of day, and they along with Ralph are the funnest people I know to hang out with (Nels, accompanying Ralph to a portable toilet upon lifting the lid exclaimed suddenly, "You can't go in that - it's not a living room - it's a toilet!" WTF?). We walked the track a few laps, had coffee, caught up with friends and acquaintances. My children hugged nearly everyone they saw that they knew; they inspired Ralph and I to hug a little too.

On our way home just before 11 PM Ralph, pushing the Xtracycle with the kids on the back, abruptly moved the front wheel to allow a car past us and knocked the kids onto the pavement all in the glare of headlights and in front of about a thousand teenage hooligans. I felt bad for both the kids and Ralph but I admit slightly smug that I am pretty used to operating that bike thing. Don't worry: tomorrow I'll be punished for my hubris with a big nasty fall or at very least, a snag of my chain and pantleg.

My mom bought me a really awesome lasagna pan today; mere minutes later I am sitting here wishing I had a banneton instead. Satisfying both my minor fetishes for bread and basketry.

Labels: bike, cancer, family life, GH, X