A Magnificant Summer (with Journeys and Peaches!)

I am sitting here from my seat in the transfusion center as I get two units of red cells and a pack of platelets.  I have been feeling so tired, that I am fatigued before I get up and exhausted just watching the tennis!  So I am hoping a little blood may perk me back up again to enjoy this beautiful week we are supposed to have!  Now I have talked about this before, but nothing moves quickly in the transfusion center.  My nurse today (usual one on vacation, bless her) is a talker, I’ll tell you.  We got the IV in, finally, over a long discussion what to do in Syria, and then a longer talk about avocados as dinner food.  You can imagine that the discussion took awhile……

But here I am with someone’s gorgeous, barn-door-red blood, pumping into my tired looking arm, and I have time to write.  I want to write about the magnificent summer I have had.  Truly, had I not experienced it, I wouldn’t have believed it.  Starting in May, we had kids come home especially worried as I had had a significant medication error that made me throw up and not drink and get into a terrible cycle that we all thought was going to be my end.  Just as the kids began to come home, the oncologist and the new weekend hospice nurse saved my life, shifted my meds, and literally hours later, I was up and well again.  We will call it save number one. 

Then I had the opportunity to really talk with the kids about what happened, and they had the good sense to want to talk to a therapist who was already working with us.  I have to thank my lucky stars, and I do every day, that our kids are the ages that they are (22, 19).  They were able to reach out to us and to our support system and ask about life and death.  Also, our hospice nurse who comes once a week is such a pistol and wealth of knowledge, that she was also able to sit down with them without the parents and answer the questions that they so needed answers to—like what does death look like?  What will her body look like?  Will it be scary, will she just go to sleep, etc etc etc.  Things we all want to know, don’t we?  I want to know them too, but I know I will be kept comfortable and pain-free.  Those are the things I want to make sure of.

The summer went so fast!  I had one more scary incident that I have already described, but that seemed as if it might be my last.  We all missed the signs of fluid in my lungs, and by the time it was figured out, I was totally loopy and had to be admitted.  Now we will know the signs and symptoms of this complication, but at the time, we didn’t.  And again, this hospitalization allowed us to be totally transparent with the kids, which we realized we hadn’t always been doing.  I think it is especially hard to tell everything when all you want, all you yearn for in this life, is to allow your kids to have a relatively normal life full of everything good.  Well, that’s ridiculous, isn’t it.  In fact, what I see in these kids is a tough kind of wisdom derived from the mess we call our lives.  I don’t think we move forward much in life unless we have experienced failure and sorrow in some shape or another, and I think most of us do.  Then comes the fullness and happiness, I think, and the poetry, if we can find it.

Finally, the kids demanded we have family meetings.  These consisted of talking around the dinner table about relevant, cancer and death-related topics if there were some.  We had the wonderful good fortune of having the kids at the dinner table almost every night, but we hadn’t really been talking much about these topics.  But as soon as the dam was broken, we had truthful and thoughtful discussions about not covering things up anymore, and how do we all plan for them to go back to school in the face of all this uncertainty, etc.  As you can imagine, the discussions were hard, but so good, too.  Just being able to say the words “death” and “what comes next” and “Dad, will you be able to handle the mom-stuff?”  And more.  What a relief to be able for all of us to talk this way.

And guess what I learned?  I learned that my kids feel safe and surrounded by the love of so many people.  They understand what is happening to the best of their ability and know they have each other, Chip, and a whole future in front of them.  I am amazed by them, and I am so thankful for this summer that allowed us time to say how much we love each other and to say a gentle goodbye too.  I don’t have my son to throw me over his back and haul me upstairs any more, as he has gone back to college, nor do I have my beautiful daughter who helped me laugh aloud at myself and at her, but I have my amazing sister who has taken a sabbatical just to help me get to my death while first pushing me towards an outing every few days (Brent, you are a superstar! ), and my  husband who has leaned in to this whole process, loved me through it, and made my outdoor living space a wonderland.  And to all the artists, poets, friends, and colleagues and the mix of all those things, thank you too for this summer; you have and will always be a godsend!

How about some poetry:

This just came across my  email from Panhala: 

The Journey (Mark Strand)

A journey continues until it stops

A journey that stops is no longer a journey

A journey loses thing on its way

A journey passes through things, thing pass through it

When a journey is over, it loses itself to a place

When a journey remembers, it begins a journal

Which is a new journey about an old journey

A journey over time is different from a journey into time

An actual journey is into the future

A reflective journey is into the past

***

A journey always begins in a place called Here

Pack your bags and imagine your journey

Unpack your bags and imagine your journey is done

***

If you're afraid of a journey, don't buy shoes

( This next, a particular favorite, and the peaches this summer have been so succulent and full of wonder)

From Blossoms (Li-Young Lee)

From blossoms comes

this brown paper bag of peaches

we bought from the boy

at the bend in the road where we turned towards

signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,

from sweet fellowship in the bins,

comes nectar at the roadside, succuluent

peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,

comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,

to carry within us an orchard, to eat

not only the skin, but the shade,

not only the sugar, but the days, to hold

the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into

the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live

as if death were nowhere

in the background, from joy

to joy to joy, from wing to wing,

from blossom to blossom to

impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

I’d say, even if death is around, we can still live this way!

Cheers to all,

Lissa