Then and Now

A couple years ago I attended a funeral with my parents days after my dad was released from the hospital for his second surgery. I was still emotionally recovering from the heavyness of his recovery, had just moved out and into my own apartment, and embarking on my adulthood. As I sat watching people talk about this man, I couldn't help but project my situation and see myself standing up on stage saying good bye to my dad. I came home and wrote this narrative. I read it to my roommate and she said that it sounded to her like a letter. I opened the phonebook and sent this piece to a random house, to someone I don't know and rid myself of it. I just recently thought of it and pulled it up. Reading through it's amazing how much things have changed. Even my thought process and emotional state. I decided to put it on here, because this journey has a past and it's just as relevent to the thesis of this blog.

  Today I was at a memorial service for my dad’s friend who died after a twenty-year battle with cancer. My dad has cancer. This man gave my dad a framed picture of a quote that said, “Let us be judged by the Footprints we leave behind,” when he (my father) was diagnosed the first time. My dad would show that picture to people who came over to our house and tell how this man (his name was Robyn) was his hero in his, then, new fight with cancer. I was glad he had someone to confide in going through the steps to recovery.
    When Robyn was diagnosed with Prostate cancer in 1992, the doctors gave him six months to live. He finally died April 9, 2008. Two days before my dad was given news that he had yet another brain tumor and would have to do immediate surgery. What he felt with the news of the two I don’t know. However, I do know he has never said anything about feeling defeated.
    The day after my father’s successful surgery, I tried explaining to my aunt all the emotions I was feeling and how this time around it just doesn’t affect me like it used to.
    “In a way I feel like I had to go through this again to get over what happened last time.” Last time when I went two years crying every time I had to talk about my dad’s sickness. I couldn’t accept it, even when we were sure it was over. It’s like it's drawn this piece of my soul out of me and I wasn’t ready to come to terms with the fact that it was gone.
    And now five days after my dad’s second surgery, I can breathe. The doctors told us this would probably never really go away. They expect a surgery like this to occur every couple years and the more the cells grow it could become more frequent. They told us that the body wouldn’t be able to handle radiation every time and that he’s healthy for now and we should just take it a day at a time.
    And we do.
    When I go into supermarkets, café’s, parks, and I’m standing at cross walks, I wonder how many bodies passing by me are infected with this. This silent disease that doesn’t speak but invades our bodies and changes our course of life forever. You start going through people in your family who you know had it and are certain it’s only years before it gets to you. Like diabetes or something. You just convince yourself it’s genetic.
    To this day I haven’t been able to write out exactly what I want to say about all that we’ve gone through as a family. I find my poetry reflective on my love life, my friends, and the mischief of being 19 but not of this subject. This ache that I still house, but in a sense, feel ok with.
    Sometimes the feeling comes up and I look around frantically for a way to catch it. Put it in a jar and do all that I can to recreate what it’s done in my life. I look for a pen, a brush, my ballet shoes, my camera, I try to play my guitar, but as I hold all these things the feeling just stays quiet. It doesn’t want to be copied or portrayed, it’s like it just wants to sit. And in return so do I. I sit staring at it, feeling it, wanting so badly to ask it all these questions… but I can’t.
    I’ve started to convince myself that it happened to save my parents marriage. That it happened so that I could hear him tell me he loves me before I had decided he didn’t. That it happened to make him sit back and see life for the little pleasures that it gives.
    When my dad was first diagnosed I used to catch him watching the sun come up. He looked deep in thought, and I wondered if I was supposed to reach for him. Tell him I loved him and that I was here to fight with him, and for him.
    Now I see nostalgia in his eye’s, I’m certain a little is fear, but I also see how determined he is to get better.
“It’s no big deal”, he says, “just a waste of time.”