Not in the brochure

I wrote the following around 10 days ago. I’ve delayed posting it till now.
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Here it is, the 10th of March. My mom’s had cancer for 2 years. Now it is starting to get the better of her, as cancer so often does. She’s got it in her spleen, colon, lymph nodes, liver, and lung. That is a significant fraction of the viscera available to take down. She’s 82 years old, and gone through the gauntlet of chemotherapies, and this is where she is.

She is dying. Not today or tomorrow, but maybe next week, or the next week, or the following. We don’t know.

I arrived in Costa Rica, heard her voice on the telephone as she got worse, and realized I was in the wrong place.

I missed my dad’s death. I’m not going to miss my mom’s. I will be there with her. Somehow I have to suppress the dread of empathic recognition, and the palpable feeling of a hole where she will be exiting. Or maybe I can just live in all of it. But I will escort my mom out of here.

On the flight home, I sat on the plane with a young woman whose dad had died 3 years ago of Wegener’s disease. I think that is the name she used. I’ve never heard of it. Neither had she. She had only a few years before been let in on the fact that her mom had multiple sclerosis. So she and her sister and dad were all watching out for mom, when her dad got pneumonia as a consequence of his disease, and up and died. Now her mom is transitioning from barely walking to not walking.

This shit isn’t in the brochure.

I watched a Robert Dinero tear-jerker on the plane out of the corner of my eye. I saw it coming from a long way away and didn’t purchase the earphones; there would have been a flash flood if I had. This is a turbulent time in my life. Not a bucolic sabbatical, but a tumultuous one.

The director of the biological station in Costa Rica had some keen insights to all of this. First he said, “you are doing the right thing”, that is by cutting my research month short at 10 days to assure that I am there when Mom dies. He had missed his mom’s death 40 years previously and is still not over it.

Through all of this, I try not to lose track that this is the natural order of things. The same director also recalled his days in Ghana. There, the death of a parent is a cause for a happy celebration of a natural milestone. By contrast, the death of ones child is considered a dark, dark day. I like this dichotomy. I hope when it is my turn my kids and I can mark my imminent passing in a spirit of celebrating all that is natural.

But all this natural order of things doesn’t much change the hole I’m feeling.