Over the last few months, I’ve put out a couple of blog posts about the process of my mom slowly dying. She’s been fighting lung cancer, and last year it metastasized to her brain. The docs gave her until about Christmas 2016 at best.
I’m fresh out of poetic, meaningful rambles about that.
I’m planning a trip to see her next week.
Yes. It’s nearly April 2017 and she’s still alive. My sister is doing a fabulous job of care-taking, but none of us expected things to … well, drag on this long, to be blunt. I hate myself for phrasing it that way, because I should be So! Happy! That mom is still Alive! Right??
Except not. Mom’s going through the expected cycle of physical and mental decline, just more slowly than expected. I was entirely braced and ready to lose her by Christmas, had all the schedules and structures in place in my head for how 2017 would unfold vis à vis my grieving and helping settle the estate and me getting back into the convention circuit and so on.
(Pause here to laugh ruefully. And a bit maniacally.)
I should really know better than that by this point in my life. The more you plan, the more things go awry. So here we are, and here I go again. Back on the road, hauling editing and writing jobs along to keep me company.
Not the worst life imaginable. I do relish challenges.
It is extremely odd and a bit disheartening to realize that the miracle I wanted was for mom to have a quiet, pain-free, drama-free, and relatively swift journey through the process of dying. Instead, I have the miracle of her quietly, peacefully, slowly living on. It’s absolutely amazing that she’s still here with us. I apparently come from very sturdy, stubborn stock.
Makes me wonder what’s waiting ahead for my siblings, and for me…