I drove to my old hometown yesterday. It’s a beautiful drive, complete with rolling hills, vineyards, dairy farms, across a mountaintop to views of the Shenandoah Valley, across Shenandoah River. I always love this drive.
The destination itself is a lot more complicated. About half a dozen of my remaining relatives in the area are over the age of 65, including my grandmother who is now 91. My father and my aunt have bone cancer, my mother has many health problems, including now a possible recurrence of breast cancer — I drove down to see her through a biopsy. After I dropped mom off at her biopsy, I took Dad over to another part of the hospital for a chemotherapy treatment.
It was sobering to see how many people were in the chemo waiting room. The stress of living with cancer is compounded by the effects of the chemo, and that is compounded by the mechanics of signing in for your appointment. First you sign in, get your restaurant-style buzzer, then you wait. Dad and I waited about 15-20 minutes before he was called in. He was only inside about 10 minutes (I waited in the waiting room). When he came back out, I thought we were finished, incredibly optimistic and naive of me. It turns out that a blood test has to be done before every chemo treatment, and you have to sit in the waiting room until this has been processed. If the results come back favorably, you go ahead with your chemo treatment which takes about another 40 minutes. If the patient is lucky, he’s out in an hour and a half. If not, he could spend at least half a day, usually twice a week, sitting in that waiting room.
I find as I get older that I don’t even like sitting through things I used to enjoy, like going to the salon for a pedicure or having my hair done. Chemo would definitely try my patience. While we sat through Dad’s treatment, my mom miraculously appeared from a backdoor in the chemo room. Her biopsy nurse had wheeled her from two city blocks away through the labyrinth of the hospital and she was happy to surprise Dad and me by sneaking in the backdoor.
Since my brother died about two years ago now, I have been trying to wrap my brain around death. For a while everyone who died (famous people, even famous people I had not previously been interested in) felt a bit like my brother dying all over again. Clearly we have reason to expect that my grandmother, my father and my aunt, and probably my mother, will all pass away sometime in the next few years.
And then, like my brother, after the shock wears away, they will be memories. But my children will barely remember them. My husband never knew them in their heydays. They will talk to me before I go to sleep at night and I will wish I could talk back.
I don’t believe in an afterlife, heaven. If you are fortunate enough to be hopelessly intertwined with another person, the way immediate families are, you’ll be loved and remembered and pined for. I don’t have this figured out, the whole meaning of life thing. From what I can tell so far, it’s a lot like Dad’s chemo waiting room.


Recent Comments