An update on grandpa:
The results of his recent P.E.T. scan went as well as I think was honestly expected. Which was not well, at least by most established social and familial standards.
The verdict: the cancer has spread too much throughout his stomach, into his pancreas, liver, and up into his esophagus, for the proposed surgery to be worthwhile, or even effective. While in this case real news is better than sugarcoated news, the results of the consultation remain bittersweet at best.
Sweet, because it means my grandpa won’t have to suffer the emotional and physical strains of undergoing the originally proposed radical surgery; he won’t necessarily have to be bed-ridden for any extended period of time; he won’t have to dwell on the “what-ifs?” surrounding the implications of electing to forego the surgery, which, as he admitted to me prior to the consultation, would have been his course of action regardless of the surgeons and specialists deeming the procedure effective.
Bitter, because the surgeons and specialists involved in the consultation estimated that my grandpa is now working with a meager six-month timeline.
Striking me at this particular moment is the unprecedented blessing of love. More specifically, the amazing amount of love one person can possess for another, and how this love alone can blissfully blur the edges of life, all the while holding to a consciousness of never having promised an endless view through the rose-colored lenses.
Loving another means you are willingly subjecting yourself to the deepest level of emotional vulnerability. It also means you are accepting the greatest benefaction offered in this life. When considering the plenitude of painful moments unmistakenly connected to the complexly joyful package of loving another person, it seems sad to even begin to think love worth trading for the proposed safety found in emotional and relational detachment. Because everyone loves at some point in their life, and everyone loses, but, and enter the hopeless romantic in me, truly loving, even for a moment, so gracefully balances any previous or forthcoming loss so as to render the entire ordeal worthwhile.
Love is what gives breathe, breeds hope, and ultimately provides a sense of purpose to this otherwise seemingly senseless world.
Truly the implications surrounding a world with a population that could continually live in the light of such a selfless and ceaseless love seem limitless and awe-inspiring. As this situation with my grandpa clearly supports, the world can shift in the briefest of moments, the monotony of daily living suddenly disrupted, replaced with the repudite realization that the only aspect of life that now matters centers upon simply loving on a person for as long as humanly allowed. Savoring precious time.
Losing someone close to you, or in this case, the promise of losing someone, makes you stand face to face with your true affection for them. And if it isn’t love, then saying goodbye doesn’t necessarily hurt.
This hurts. And I’m glad.
Stories I said I had. Tangential stories and life-changing ones.
Until today I haven’t known where, exactly, to begin. And so quiet this space has mostly been because some beginnings are tricky. Sometimes it’s quite impossible to denote where something ended and something else entirely began.
I’m not going to be able to tell you everything, but then the best stories never really do, do they?
(That’s not a trick question. I promise they don’t.)
(Unless the story was penned by Henry James, in → Read more...
This week I’ve been finding pieces of writing long lost and forgotten. Unearthing words belonging to me, and words penned by some of my favorite of all literary voices, collected and saved and scrawled excitedly on pages littered with foggy memories of past lives, obscured now in light of all that was and is and is to come.
Of the words not belonging to me, Lucille Clifton’s were the ones I found most often, recounted in notebook after notebook, or inked → Read more...
They say water changes stone, carving it over time to angles and dimensions in harmony with water’s need to reach the sea; but sometimes, stones change the watercourse instead.
-The lovely and eclectic Shari
I’m collecting my favorite corners, like the one with the stunning oak tree on display for an entire neighborhood to see, its limbs shading a bustling crosswalk shooting confidence into pedestrians like electric currents of white light, fresh graffiti on a nearby curb: an infinity symbol, black and simple.
I’m collecting stories about the apartment window filled with small elephant figurines along one of my favorite walking routes. So many trunks standing side-by-side and none of them alive.
I’m collecting the surprisingly → Read more...