The Weight

Entry 1     3:56 p.m.

Bifurcated reality. I have been living it for a year and a half. It may explain my ability to clearly understand the contradictory embrace of the belief you need to prepare to tell your children in the next few weeks that you are stopping chemo. AND repeatedly announcing to your erstwhile spouse thereafter that you are going to beat this cancer. Holding both of those things at the same time may seem to the inexperienced as explosive as storing matter and antimatter in the same Tupperware container. I however, am certifiable at this point, sooooo.  . .

I am living over the abyss in a straw house with a Plexiglas floor. Whether I am standing still or moving, I am thinking about the abyss and gazing down into it. I worry about the abyss.  Will the floor fail, and will I tumble down, endlessly? Will I not notice and fall to my death? What will happen when I fall in? Would a parachute help? What if the parachute doesn't work? Where does the abyss lead? What if it isn't an abyss at all, but a painting of an abyss on the opposite side of the Plexiglas, painted by people before me for reasons impossible for me to comprehend? 

So, here I am with someone who is waiting for a world not made by hands, while I am expecting the deluge. Comprehending this reality is, well, a mind fuck.  More than 80 percent of cancer deaths, according to 10 year old statistics, occur in hospital.  I doubt much has changed. When I explained to Jenny that she is mistaken in believing the chemotherapy is keeping her alive--that the doctor told her the poisons are doing more harm than good, and explained this meant she could have another bleed and end up in the hospital alone again (fucking COVID), she couldn't comprehend what that means. I said it in plain English, but her comprehension is diminishing--seemingly rapidly. I am so worried she will suffer in the end.

We now have a wheelchair and a rollator downstairs. She complains about the wheelchair, but the complaint has shifted from I don't need a wheelchair to I need a wheelchair with big wheels in the back so I can control it.  She can't wheel herself for long, to be sure, given her shortness of breath, weakness and severe loss of muscle mass. It is about control, maintaining the illusion that each of us has that s/he is the author of their own story, with full editorial control. This is breaking my heart.

If Jenny were Evel Knievel, then acceptance would be the Snake River Canyon, and her hopes Knievel's much vaunted Skycycle. In theory, she should be trying to make the most of her time left, and she is certainly busy. But, I would think acceptance would make the urgency clear and move her to choose both the things she is doing more carefully and also the people she is doing it with more selectively. That she would choose children uber alles, would be what I would have expected from the Jenny I knew. I have doubts I would be any better, or I would just fall short in a different way.

I have a tendency to stop, to feeze, and I feel I am trending toward that now. I am struggling against it, but it's heavy. Fingers crossed.






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