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kvetching up

Navigating our lives in the time of COVID-19 and pancreatic cancer. If nothing else, I created one hell of a playlist.

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Showing posts from December, 2023

Christmas Time Is Here

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Saturday, December 09, 2023

I've been derelict in journaling for some time. I am tired of all the maudlin reminiscences and rehashing of old complaints, in text anyway.

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nigel: In 2021, I finally understand the old nursery rhyme, There Was A Crooked Man. Everything in that world, like my own, is jenky. I write to remember against forgetting.

Popular posts from this blog

Life, A Cascading Series of Disappointment

Sunday, September 20, 2020

Jenny has cancer. Terminal cancer. We learned that in late July. Jenny had dropped 25 lbs. in the spring without trying. She had been having vague stomach complaints since October. As a balm for her concerns, her doctor agreed to do a CT scan for her, but told her they would find nothing. Jenny wanted to rule out pancreatic cancer, which had recently killed her dad-in the spring of 2019. Her mother had been sick with lymphoma since February 2020. The day of the scan, the doctor told Jenny they would get results back in a few days. When Jenny's phone rang that same afternoon, I was in the living room with Abby, where I was torturing her by playing the Rapping Duke on Youtube. Jenny shouted from the room, "Geoff, get in here, the doctor's on the phone." "You have a four cm. mass on your pancreas," he said. Jenny made a sound like someone had punched her in the stomach. "There is a spot on your liver. You have a necrotic lymph nod...

Still Muddling Through Somehow

Sunday, November 16, 2025

At the park, I walked my dog through the rain this morning— not really proper rain— more like air that has decided to shrug water at you out of habit. It suited my mood well enough. As I walked, my thoughts kept returning to the same small universe they often do. They are not new thoughts. They orbit the same losses. They consider the same betrayals, the same questions that never resolve. They have been captured, these thoughts, never to escape, never to be forgotten, never to burn up in the atmosphere. It is simply the gravitational field of my life now. What might seem or feel like self-pity is more like muscle memory, which tells me I need more exercise. The holidays are here, and Christmas has always been central to my life, atheist that I am. It was stitched into Jenny’s life — the love of Christmas — at least as strongly as it was stitched into mine. We carried that love forward with the kids, year after year, without ever needing to talk about why it mattered; it just did. I...

Don't Do It, Don't Do It, Oh, Lord

Friday, April 23, 2021

It Hurts, It Hurts So Bad. . . 3:44 a.m. I walked in the door last night at just before 10 to find Jenny in a ball on the floor--between the giant ottoman and sectional--agonizing pain in her hip. I had ridden to acting with the student driver. But, let's back up. Jenny had chemo yesterday. Her friend Jennifer took her. It was uneventful and she received chemo. I, as always, prepared the house for her arrival to make sure she wanted for nothing and would be comfortable as she endures the aftermath of all that poison. Sometime before she came home, she texted, saying the doctor suggested she try Aleve for her hip pain. Aleve. She asked me to pick some up for her while Abby was at acting. During the text exchange I realized she would be alone after Abby and I left for acting. Leiney was elsewhere and had therapy at 5 and kickboxing later, and her sister Moni had bailed on chemo because she had so much to do (Wit...

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