are we there yet?

FiNaLLy. and so it is cold. and so it is thanksgiving. and so we have hopefully reached the final day of radiation. and slowly and suddenly at the same time things begin to return to normal, to the familiar. fall feels like fall and life beyond comes back into view. i can tell this from my dreams, too, which for the first time in months have revolved around future action rather than reliving or reinventing a past or current event. i am trying to breathe, to relax, to let relief sink in. but is hard to do, harder than it sounds. my worry, my fear, my anxiety, my anger, my shock, my grief...it holds on in every nook and crevice of my body and skeleton. i feel it in my bones, in my joints, in my muscles. it seems to be a part of the very fiber of my being. ingrained. imprinted. trapped. and i do not know how to loosen it, to expel it. i sweat and i stretch every day and it seemingly does no good. and so i try to learn to live with it, around it, because of it, in spite of it...

i know what i know. if you know what i mean.

cUrRenT eVeNtS. it never ceases to amaze me the way in which a death or an illness can instantly take you out of the world around you and lock you away from moving with the rest of the world. my mom's cancer is doing that. big time. the elections this past week were a blur. a blur that i couldn't bring myself to really care about. or to vote in. even though before this diagnosis, before this radiation and chemotherapy, before this back and forth and back and forth between new york and gloucester, i was focused on many of these races, desperate to see a loss of power among the republicans, hopeful that our country would start making amends for some of its terrible choices at the polls in the past decade. and, yet, tuesday came and it was not about any election, it was about chemotherapy being stopped because of malnutrition. i am in the middle of making sure all shifts are covered at my bikram studio over thanksgiving week. and thanksgiving means nothing to me this year. the word is almost unrecognizable to me, like something in another language. nonsense. jibberish. if the last day of radiation is tuesday, november 21st, on thursday, november 23rd we should know when they will complete chemo and when they will operate to remove whatever remains in her neck and throat. or will we? maybe we will still be waiting for those answers. whatever the case, she will probably still be feeding through the tube, and we certainly will not be sitting around the table enjoying turkey and stuffing. she is too sick and run down at this point to even delude ourselves with playing at the pretense of observing a holiday as if all is normal. nothing is normal. and i am moving on some plane, in some reality, that is not in tune with the world, with current events. and i am not sure how i get where i need to be in the morning or how i get home at the end of the day, i just know the next time i get on the bus to go back to boston, how many cans of formula she has taken in so far today, how many cans she is supposed to take in during a day, what the difference between those two totals is and what that means for her recovery, how many treatments have been completed, how many are left to go, and how much i need love and courage to be enough.