I am so grateful to my little blog Angel in Anchorage who set this up for me. Through the site complete strangers and old friends from college have found me and it makes me smile to think of all of you and the way our lives have intersected. I hope to write all of you individually when I get a chance but until then thanks for keeping in touch.

Chapter Thirty – January 10, 2008
The problem with only sitting down at a computer to put my thoughts on paper once a month is now as you read these you might find them even more schizophrenic than they were before. But still….my brain is full so here are my disjointed ramblings as they come tumbling out around me.

Do you know what absolutely freaks me out about death? What brings me sadness and pain and regret? My Grandma died over the holidays and I traveled down to her home town for the funeral. I walked into the church where I received my First Communion and attended countless Catechism classes and expected to be completely devoid of emotion. I expected it because I work with old people and I know that I will lose them. I knew my Grandma was not well and I felt good about the way I had told her over the years that I loved her. I expected then that when I stood at her coffin I would feel nothing. But something very different hit me as I stood over her. Instead I noticed the pink flowers stitched on the pillow near her head and I thought about how my aunt did a lovely job picking out the coffin. There was embroidery on the lining that was reminiscent of the pillow cases she used to make us when we were small. I noticed her dress and realized it was the same one she wore to my wedding 12 years ago. I looked at her hands and though they were bruised from the I.V. I could still picture them shuffling cards and making cookies…..I opened my mouth to speak…. to tell her all of those things…I literally opened my mouth and took a breath as if my heart had not processed what my brain was telling it. I had to catch myself from speaking out loud to my Grandmother at her viewing because I hadn’t yet realized that she was really gone. Any opportunity I had to tell her something was gone… and it came crashing into me….. my shoulders weighted down by the sheer impact of how final death is and how there are no second chances to get it right. When people die they say we keep a piece of them with us….but all I could think about standing at the alter to deliver a reading in her honor was that we may find comfort in the ways that they changed us, memories we hold that are pleasant, however, death takes from us too. The person we were before….someone’s granddaughter, daughter, wife, mother, friend…. As we lose the people we care for we lose those relationships as well….and it changes us and leaves us somehow less than we were before. I used to have a woman in my life who loved me because I was her granddaughter and she was proud of me and enjoyed her time with me and she laughed at my ridiculous stories and I was her granddaughter and now I’m not anyone’s granddaughter and it’s a strange…sad…. permanent place to be.

My surgery in December went well and I’m recovering. Honestly it was easy, uneventful and comparatively speaking, pain-free. I am so excited to have the tissue expanders removed. They were never comfortable, not designed to take up residency in any body for long and so even in recovery directly after the surgery I woke to hear myself say: “Oh My…. That feels much better.” I’m not quite done yet, four more procedures I think before I am “anatomically correct” but hopefully no more surgeries. I’m still getting used to the implants. The size and shape of them keep changing as swelling goes down and they settle. They were the perfect size two weeks ago and have grown substantially since then. Eek…..I’m starting to look like I was stung by a bumble bee. But as I found myself anxiously changing shirts in my closet the other night before guests arrived for dinner…I could feel myself getting worked up… “Are they too big?” “What will people think of them?” The absurdity of worrying about what others think hit me and I gave myself permission to just be happy with whatever they end up being. I thought about the pain of the Mastectomy, the blood, the incisions the recovery. I thought about the reconstruction and the stretching of muscles and skin and the excruciating pain that I hid from all of you but that would leave me rocking in place, over medicating in the hopes of relief or death and in those moments I hurt so bad that I honestly didn’t care which came first. So leaning against a wall in my closet that night, thinking about all of that, I put on my shirt and without looking in the mirror walked out of that space and into another, completely carefree of any judgment that may come my way. I have the peace to know at least I have the most politically correct boob job around, whatever they are or turn out to be, they were hard earned and therefore anyone who doesn’t like it or me because of them can bite me.


The end of the year continued to provide trauma for our little community. More deaths, sickness, and hurt. I was anxious for 2007 to be over and continue to be hopeful for the New Year, that it will provide a different point of view than its predecessor…. Though as I run every day and try to sort it out in my head the only thing I know for sure is how little I actually know. When I was in my 20’s I was so sure I had all of this figured out. That Life was about choices and you made the right choices and therefore walked down the right path and if you did those things correctly then tragedy and trauma would not find you. Now I realize that I know nothing. That life is less about avoiding pain and more about how you handled yourself when faced with it. I keep telling people who call and ask for advice that I am confident that I only know two things for sure:
1) God loves us and wants us to experience real joy. When we laugh, I believe he does too.
AND
2) When faced with the inevitable pain that life also dishes out, we are meant to be here to comfort each other and step through the pain together and back into the light of joy.

In my 33 years…. That is all that I know for sure…. The rest of it is transient debris…. blowing past me, but those two things I know for sure.

So I’ve been thinking about love too…. True love that is…. This month I’ve been filled with thoughts on death and dying, cancer, recovery, and love. How’s that for a mouth full. Anyhoo – The love thing has been haunting me since before Florida actually but then an incident occurred with my daughter that I keep spinning in my head.
My daughter has many, many, many treasures. They all hold significance in her life. I’ll give you the other version to help you put it into perspective. My son has received hundreds of gifts throughout his life. He remembers very little about who they came from and he holds almost no emotional attachment to them what so ever. When told to go through his toys to find things to donate to those less fortunate he will take a Hefty bag and start filling it randomly in his room until it is full. I then have to go through it and haul out the Woody doll given to him by my sister when he was two and the Harry Potter figurine and the books that he still loves to read etc. “Stuff” holds no meaning in his world. My daughter on the other hand still has the wrapper that her favorite doll came in AND she claims to NEED it and will fall crying to the ground when you threaten to dispose of it. Cleaning her room means doing it when she is off the premises or asleep.

So recently something tragic happened to one of her prized possessions and Campbell’s heart was broken. You have all heard about her “ONETRUELOVEGRADYMICHAELSKILLINGS” who she claims proposed to her in preschool and who she still says she plans to marry someday. When I was first diagnosed, Grady, who comes from a long, proud, line of Republicans brought Campbell a stuffed elephant from his collection to comfort her when her mommy was sick. She treasures “Ellie” and is despondent when he is occasionally lost for brief periods under the couch or behind a chair.
So against our better judgment, Campbell packed Ellie on our most recent trip to Florida. After an exhausting day of shopping we headed to the check out line with carts filled with sun screen and floaty toys and snacks….as we were loading the cart again to leave the store we turned to see Campbell’s purple/red face twisted in anguish with SILENT tears streaming down her chin. I can tell you in my life with that child that I much prefer shrieking screams to silent tears because when the tears come without sound I know that the shit has seriously hit the fan.
I immediately shifted into “impatient, grouchy, demanding mommy” which is what I do when I am fearful that one of my children is in real pain. “What’s the matter?! What happened!? WHAT IS WRONG!?” My stomach turned as I realized what she was trying to say was that she left Ellie somewhere in the store and had no idea where. I immediately conducted a virtual tour of the store in my brain…of all of the places Campbell and I had been, all the aisles that we had perused and the sheer square footage was daunting. Exhausted, I pulled her from the cart and immediately began the back tracking process, of course, without success. We went to sleep that night and for many nights after to her cries…”My Ellie… My Ellie….he needs me… and I miss him and I love him and without him I will never be the same.”
I know this sounds ridiculous to most of you but I hope you understand that it has almost nothing to do with a lost stuffed animal and so much more to do with the emotion behind losing what you know in your life is true and feeling that love is lost. As I would hold her at night…clean from a bath, smelling like a sweet little girl in fresh jammies…she would cry silent tears into her pillow and tell me her heart hurt. I would cry with her and tell her I understood what that felt like and I was sorry I couldn’t fix it. After she would cry herself to sleep Trevor and I would stay up talking about that feeling… times in our lives when we lost something that couldn’t be replaced and how painful that was, still is… for us as adults.
Once we returned home Campbell would still ask about Ellie every day…. Ask if I thought he was okay, if I thought he missed her too…Did I think he was safe, warm, dry, happy….still loving her? As I said, it’s been a hard year for everyone and as I would answer her every day I would vacillate between wanting to make it better and thinking that life is about lessons and she would learn from this. One day when she asked me to call the store and see if they had found him yet I told her about my childhood and how I had a stuffed monkey that I loved so much his head had fallen off three times and my mom sewed it back every time with a different colored thread so he eventually had red and black and green stitching all over him. I told her how he wasn’t cute and in fact was a real mess but I loved him anyway and then one day I left him on a float plane when we flew back to camp and how I cried myself to sleep every night just like she was. I told her what my dad said to me. That my monkey was probably found by another little kid who really needed a friend and that maybe it was okay that my monkey was with another family now bringing someone else as much happiness as he brought me. I told her that story as a last ditch “Dear God please get over this trauma” kind of a story. And this was my daughter’s response. “Mom, I guess that is a nice thought. That someone else was taking care of your monkey and loving it and hugging it and talking to it just like you did. But wouldn’t it have made you feel better if your mom and dad had just gone back to find it or called the airplane people to see if they had a lost and found? Wouldn’t that have been even better?”
So here’s my thought folks. I believe that my children in their lifetimes will face pain. I believe that there will come a time when I am no longer here to comfort them or try to fix it… but the simple fact of the matter is that for today anyway, I am here… I can make it better and to be perfectly honest… she has a point….so a computer and a credit card were employed upon our return and Ellie arrived in the mail yesterday, safe from his travels. Though all Campbell needs to know is that the store in Florida found him and sent him home, where he belongs. Tonight when she goes to bed Ellie will be there to greet her and I am inspired today by the thought that a broken heart is mended and true love restored and at least for one little girl in our household… happy endings abound.
Love to all of you.