My sister and her cancer

I hate cancer. I have a good reason too. It killed both of my grandmothers and my mom. Now it's killing my oldest sister.

My dad went to Washington two weeks ago to do two things: meet my cousin's wife who we've never seen before and celebrate my cousin's 50^th birthday (he's an Australian citizen now and has been since he got married and we were pretty sure he'd never come back to the States because of how expensive travel is), and to spend some time with my sister who's dying.

I won't go much into my dad's visit with my cousin. My dad got to meet his wife. She was nice and fits in well with the family. My aunt loves her daughter-in-law.

I want to talk for a moment about the visit my dad had with my sister. He told me all about it last week when I returned his car to him. He let me borrow it for errands while he was gone. He told me my sister is losing weight, is going bald, and is on oxygen. The first two I can understand because that's what happened the last time she battled cancer. The oxygen is a new development for her.

And yes, I said the last time she battled cancer. This is her third go around with it. The problem this time is it has metastasized so there's no chance it's going to go away completely. She had five good years with her family with the hope that cancer wouldn't return. That ended a month ago with the new diagnosis.

My dad said my sister told him they're now looking at quality of life instead of quantity. They haven't given up on treating the various problems she's having with the cancer, but they're not sure how much more time they can give her. As a result, my sister is doing as many things as her health will let her.

When my dad went to Vancouver (WA) to see her, they went to the beach several times. My sister carted around her portable oxygen tank and went out to explore with them. They couldn't do the bonfire her husband wished they could because she can't handle the smoke. Someone a little way down from where they were having a snack was cooking on a barbecue and my sister couldn't handle the little bit of smoke that reached them from that.

But my sister poked at jelly fish, helped my younger sister collect shells, let the ocean chase her up the beach. Dad said if it wasn't for the oxygen tank, you wouldn't have known she was sick. She was being as close to her normal self as she could.

When they left, she promised to call every week to tell dad what's going on. If she's too sick, she'll make her husband do it. But one way or the other, dad's going to be kept in the loop. Dad said he'll tell me. He's passing the info along to my brother and other older sister as well.

When I have the ability to donate to anything again, I'm going to ask Himself if we can donate to that. I want to support something that's touched my life deeply. It'll be too late for my sister, and my few dollars won't make much difference, but maybe it'll be enough to give someone a dose of medicine that might help treat their cancer better.

If you have a cause you feel passionate about and can donate to it, try to find a way to budget a few dollars for it. You never know what your donation can do.

And hug your family members. You don't know when something will happen to take them away from you.

M is for Mother

Mothers. We wouldn't be here without them. Sometimes they can be the most wonderful people in the world. Other times, not so much.

My mother was not a kind woman. At least not to her children. My older siblings always tell me that they had it worse than me. My youngest older sibling (I have three older and one younger) is nine years older than me. They say my mother was worse when they were growing up. I have no basis for comparison. I wasn't around then.

But my mother was bad enough when I was growing up. She always belittled me, hit me over the tiniest provocation, and kept me isolated so no one would know what she was doing. Growing up I thought this was normal and sought my escape in books and writing, two pastimes she allowed me because she herself was a reader and a writer. It kept me from asking questions and allowed me to escape from her. So I dug myself deep into the writings of her favorite authors and expanded from there thanks to school libraries.

There were books I brought home that my mother insisted on reading first. She would force me to take them back, unread, because they were “inappropriate” in her eyes. As I got older, she stopped reading what I brought home and I found all sorts of things she didn't want me to know about. I learned about same sex pairings reading Mercedes Lackey. I found out about sex scenes reading some romance author I no longer remember the name of.

This didn't mean the abuse stopped. But it gave me an escape. I tried moving out on my own when I was twenty. I was back home within a year. My mother's controlling ways and constant verbal and emotional abuse continued. I left home at twenty two. I went to Job Corps. It was there I found out that what my mother did wasn't normal and that I could have a life of my own where she didn't control me.

I moved in with Himself's family for a while before we went out and got our own place. A part of me still expected the kind of abuse I got from my mother and I would cringe every time Himself got angry at me. I wanted to get past it but my mother's legacy still haunted me. I took Himself home with me for Christmas one year and was completely shocked by how civil my mother was to the both of us.

Then Himself and I had our break in September 2001. We lived in Washington. I took the Greyhound home and got into Boise at 2 AM. My dad picked me up and I was back at my parents' house at 2:30. I expected mom to be in bed, was expecting to be raged at and belittled for my poor choice in a boyfriend.

Instead my mom was up in her green nightgown with the old red shawl I remember so well wrapped around her shoulders. She saw me and opened up her arms. I started sobbing and was enveloped in arms and a shawl. She took me to a couch and told me he was the one who'd lost a treasure, how it was obvious he didn't know what I was worth. Everything I'd come to expect from her was turned completely around. We talked until 7 AM when I finally fell asleep on the couch. That was 9/11 so you can imagine I didn't get much sleep but my mother was there.

The last two years of her life were like a dream for me. Here, this woman I saw, I talked to, I lived with for a brief period until I got married, she was the mother I'd wanted all my life. I learned my mother was bipolar and was finally diagnosed and getting treatment.

I lost my mother two years after I came home from Washington to cancer. She went from diagnosis to death in three weeks. I railed against it for a long time, crying about how she'd been taken from me just when I was getting to know the real person behind the mental illness. Then I realized that I was thankful for those two years. And I still am.