I'm shaking the anxiety out of my limbs, trying to find something to do. I want a distraction. I want peace.
She just called me; she's sick. How sick, she won't say. Maybe a year, maybe two. I searched for it as soon as she said, but the Internet is not a place to go to feel better. Hundreds of images--is that what she'll look like? Symptoms and side effects--will she still be the vibrant lover I knew? Predictions--should I even tell my mother? Or should I carry this joy and sadness alone (a forbidden love, a secret death. All so poetic)?
Mom is a fatalist. Maybe she'll understand. If I had to fall in love with a woman, it would be a girl fated to die. I just wish the ovarian cancer had found me instead.
I don't know this sort of panic, and I probably never will, but I remember every detail of the times when I've been forced to remember my parents aren't immortal (yet).
ReplyDeleteMy mother fell down some stairs two weeks ago and she told me about it. My gut twisted so far I was surprised I lived at all.
ReplyDeleteIn the past year (while I've been away in Korea), my mother stabbed herself at work with medical equipment used by an HIV-positive patient, got hit in the eye with an apple and started seeing spots, and found a lump in her breast.
ReplyDeleteShe says she's fine. Of course, that's also what they said when my dad had cancer. Anyway, I'm glad your mother at least told you, and I hope she is okay. She's okay, right?
Sorry. I feel like I'm writing essays on here.
No, Janelle, I think we've all been missing this. Then again, I might be projecting my own feelings again.
ReplyDeleteI worry about my parents. My dad has decided to retire, and he's happy about it because work has been causing both stress and pain. My mom's health also sucks and medicines costs a super ton. Yet they don't seem to make any sort of long-term plan--how will they pay for the apartment, how they get insurance (since right now it's through Dad's job), how will they improve. Sometimes it feels like they've got all their hopes pinned on me, but I can't do that. Isn't it enough that if something happened to them (please don't let it happen), I would take care of my brother? (Probably end up with the others, too, though that wouldn't be a legal thing.) Why...anyway, whatever, doesn't need to be in a comment on Robby's blog.
My point is, I understand.
All our parents are old. I suppose Janelle and I don't have the looming promise of siblings.
ReplyDeleteWhat do we do? My mother was fifty when her mother died. How am I supposed to handle the idea of my parents' mortality at twenty!?
Shoot, my mother was twenty-eight, I think, when her mother died, which was before I was born. So it's something I've pondered. Something I also pray doesn't happen because I don't know how I'd deal with it.
ReplyDeleteYeah, Ashlee, I have missed you. And this. So please don't apologize to me. I really wish I had a computer that worked so I could call you.
ReplyDeleteYeah, my sister and grandmother actively object to being looked after. I don't want to lose my parents because they offer ME security.
My mom lost her dad at sixteen. My dad lost both of his before he turned fifty. We have decided my mom's mom is living forever. I have never been so grateful that they have unpinned their hopes and allowed me to be entirely selfish in this.