Picking up the pieces

Today started out like any other day. It was rather relaxed at work, and my CPR class got cancelled, which was kind of nice. I think it is strange, how normalcy can change with a simple email.

My sister’s diagnosis arrived when I strode in the door at the end of my day and stopped to check my email. An email was waiting from my mother, letting me know that my sister’s test results were in. She has Stage IV cancer – and that should she survive this current surgery, she is given about 18 months to live.

I can only shake my head at how unfair it is, how unjust. I want to disbelieve it. How can it be, my eldest sister, tormentor as I was growing up, artist extraordinaire – so gifted -- so much that I admire and longed to be – lying there, dying? How can this be happening?

Sunday I will go to visit, and I will hold my mother as she walks in to see her eldest lying in a hospital bed. I will be a bastion of comfort, a pillar of strength, because that is what is expected of me, and because it is what I have to be.

But inside, dear readers, my heart will quail, my legs will tremble and I will wish to run from the room. And although I will smile and touch my sister’s hand, my soul will be weeping. Though I am efficient and professional and whisk around the room making sure she is comfortable, the anger of this indignity forced upon my sister will seethe and fester.

Here, I can tell you that my eyes are blurring with angry tears. As my fingers tremble over the keyboard, I will share with you that I am devastated, horrified, -- and grieving. I am frightened at how finite life is, how death is all encompassing and shattering. I glance at my children, I have hugged them many times this evening already. I have sought the comfort of my love, my spouse…

On Sunday – no one will know this is how I am feeling. Not until we return home and my spouse turns to me and pulls me into his arms, so strong, so loving – to let me cry as if there is no tomorrow.

For there may not be.

And as I dash the tears away, I am dialing my family doctor and setting up an appointment to be scheduled for screenings that her oncologist has said all of us must get done, as soon as possible, to make sure that we are not destined to suffer the same fate.