Lay down with me in the hollow
Meet me at my low
Or in the bad angry
Or gusting cold forsaken grey
Lay with me in silence
Witness my tears
Slump with me
Let your chest rest
Against the scratchy lumpy pillow that feels just right for a nap between cries
Soon I’ll rise
And bow and bend and dance like a poppy in the spring
I’ll shine like dew on the wild grass in the morning meadow
But for now
I am lying down in the never ending
Grey of twilight
My dads two years with chemo
Rolls into a third with horrible raw radiation in the horizon
Or a beastly surgery with low odds of success
Beyond that
My moms financial situation precarious
The big house I grew up in
Has been teetering on the edge of
The cliff of my fathers life
For two years
And I fear it is tipping dangerously close to the abyss
It’s a long time to be in the tipping zone
“Anyone would be”
A friend says when I tell them I’m weary
“But I am! It’s me! Me who is weary!”
I want to scream that it’s not anyone
It’s me
And I want my pain to matter more
To the masses
But my pain is not unique
But it is high ranking pain
A google search will tell you that cancer, your own or a sick family members is one of the top most stressful events of someone’s life
That validates me
And I use it to help my mom see
Why her hand shakes
Why she’s gained weight
Why it’s hard to feel great
But she’s in denial
She’s in the tipping zone too
But she’s been for far longer than two years
I believe that illness often
Heightens and makes physical
Our perception of things
That man has been joyless, loveless, touchless, denying himself of all pleasure
For as long as I can remember
Cold as it is to say
Of course he has cancer
The tipping zone
I was out of it
For a bit
I was in avoidance
Rarely seeing him to avoid
The skin and bones hugs from that once powerful dad
Avoiding the feeding tube he must
Adjust
When he sits
The pain on his face when he burps
And it burns
From the goo in the tube
But now it’s on me
Somehow
To convince him to do the surgery and not the radiation
Is what my sister says
She’s angry at mom as always
And I’ll try and get the story from mom
And then from dad
And try to piece together
Some realistic picture of the options
The outcomes
The side effects
I ultimately will be removed from
At my place a few miles away
What’s the best choice?
I don’t know
To go back to his childhood?
To go back ten years and tell mom I found his bourbon?
Is it our fault?
That we didn’t say anything as he burned away his esophagus with drink after drink on an empty stomach
Of course not, I would tell a friend
Of course it’s not your fault, I could tell my siblings
We all knew
But we all had to hide it
Those were the rules
The tipping zone rules