**Warning**~Reading this post may cause feelings of shittiness & depressive thoughts.
Sorry about the dispiriting tone to this entry. But today is an anniversary of sorts for me, and for my family, and it deserves to be properly addressed. If for nothing more than just to get it out there. Because if it's out there, it's not in here, crushing me emotionally.
Eight years ago. That sounds like a long time, doesn't it? Though it feels like yesterday for those of us who lived it. Eight years ago today, I held my breath and my mother's hand, and listened to the sentences fall out of her oncologist's mouth and slam off of the cold, clean exam room floor.
"Go home and celebrate the time that you have left. I'm very sorry Ellieb43, but there isn't anything more that we can do."
I will never forget that utterance. Twenty three words that have since branded an everlasting scar of a memory on my brain. Twenty three words that hit my heart like invisible bullets. But the grenade was in her eyes when she looked at me. Filled with tears that threatened to reveal emotions she never wanted me to see, she was defiant when she nodded, and told me: "We'll look for another doctor. On the internet. When we get home. Ok? We won't give up." And it was in that moment that I broke.
I excused myself, and stumbled out of the exam area and into the hallway. A nurse seemingly came from nowhere and kindly guided me thru the doctor's private entrance. I stood in front of the elevator doors and pushed the button on the wall as if my life depended on it, because her's did. I couldn't look at her. I could not let her see me like that. She gave birth to me. She changed my diapers. She watched me bear my own children. But I would not let my mother watch me fall apart.
For the fifteen months prior to that day, we assured and reassured. No negativity allowed. Positive vibes only. She was going to be the exception to the five year small cell lung cancer survival rate rule. And then suddenly, twenty three words turned her into a statistic. Two sentences managed to erase fifty six years. Just like that.
I don't remember much about the ride home, other than that I had swapped positions with my stepfather, begging him to sit in the back of the ambulance with my mom so that I could take shotgun in my sister's car. Never in my life have I ever felt like such a fucking failure. I knew it was coming. We all did. But what we never knew before that moment was that so did she. She didn't want us to know. And when it became the inevitable, she couldn't bring herself to tell us.
I think about that day a lot. More than the day of her passing. More than I've come to the conclusion that there is nothing I can't face in this lifetime. Nothing will ever hurt like that day did. It's one of the few positives to come out of it. The other? Is that she didn't have to say it herself. For how much I couldn't deal with the news coming from Dr. Volk's mouth, there quite possibly would have been two casualties of that disease had I had to hear it from her's.
So here it is, eight years later. Time does heal wounds. Though I strongly suspect it's going to take aeons to completely erase her from my memory. I still miss her. I still think about her every day. I still dream of her at night. I still catch myself reaching for the phone. I still long to crawl into her bed with her and watch repeats of The Honeymooners. And it still kills me to watch the kids reach milestones that I know she would have loved to witness, too. They remember her fondly, and they mention her all the time. I never believed in organized religion. But that alone reminds me that she never really left us, that she's still here and watching out for us.
Some days, you get by. But some days...are certainly more difficult than others.
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This made me tear up.
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