one whole year

You know, I thought I'd be feeling very reflective one year on since the diagnosis and initial biopsy.  That I'd write something profound (ha) about life, death, what's changed for me.  But the well is dry on those subjects.  It's with disbelief that I look at the calendar and realise that it was a year ago my life was fundamentally altered by a phone call, taken in my office after hours. A whole year.

I'm sitting with my son on his sheepskin right now, while he grabs his toes and works on a tooth (I think). (Do not even start with the put down your device and enjoy him crap.  I enjoy him a lot.  I also am an adult and there's only so long I can admire him unswervingly while slobbering on a rubber butterfly). He's just finished a tasty lunch of avocado, preceded by some boob.  We went for a long walk in the sunshine this morning.  In less than a week his father is on holiday for two and a bit weeks.  So, aside from the obvious, life isn't too shabby for me right now. That leads to a lot of guilt.

Christ it's hard writing about the minutiae at the moment.  I don't want to delve into Big Feelings but I can't find a happy place in prattling about what I did today, or what I ate, or what I saw, etc etc.

Call it a day.

left ring finger

I am back at home for a couple of weeks before Christmas. It is a flurry of admin and chores, lavishing attention on two neglected cats, attempting to get W sleeping in a cot before he actually bursts through the sides of the portable bassinet we've been using at Mum's house. I have made phone calls today, opened mail, shopped for food, planned meals, unpacked bags.  I felt useful to my husband, my son, my life.  

Mum now gets to pick up the pieces of her life and attempt to move on, in the era after Dad.  For her, I'm very little help.  I can't replace him.

I looked at her wedding ring a lot, over the past two weeks. Traitorous, I watched it shine while consumed by the fact that she's suddenly a widow, single.  The ring sits in the present tense, a false declaration of what box she should tick on a government form.  But yet nothing feels more true than that ring, a survivor of the wreckage that brain cancer made of their marriage.  

She wore her engagement and eternity rings to Dad's party and to a Christmas party hosted by the neighbours.  I didn't ask about how she felt as she undressed those nights, tucking those rings back into her jewellery box.

They were married 36 years, together 39. She now faces another 20 or 30 years without him (assuming, that is, that she lives a fairly standard life span.  We know that's not a given, we know it now deep in our bones). She's fairly stoic and grieves on her own.  I know that she goes down the farm to check the stock and cries out there, in the early dawn light on the land that they worked so hard to attain and keep.  I cry and rage that it's unfair.  What she says from time to time, before quietly weeping, is that there's someone missing. It breaks my heart afresh to hear it, each time.

She will have less than a week by herself before my sister arrives on the farm.  K and I cross over at Christmas.  P, W and I stay until the New Year.  We have another trip to see her at the end of January, for her birthday.  Mid February we'll join her for a week at the bach on the lake.  We've booked her flights to spend a long weekend with us at the end of Feb.  We're trying hard to fill the giant hole rent in her life, but I'm achingly aware that it's a paltry second best.  

i cannot stop reliving it

The sun has come out again here today, after a soupy morning and two days of mizzle. Summer is arriving in Hawke's Bay.  Dad lived almost a full year of the seasons following his diagnosis and, pregnant/postpartum/worried, I lived them with him.

Summer was hot, scorching.  I spent the summer months searing memories of Dad onto my (functioning, non-cancerous) brain, wondering if it would be the last Christmas, the last summer.  Dad nearly died late in summer.  As the heat withered grass, trees, any slice of green, I realised that time was short.  Not just metaphorically, but literally.

Autumn was consumed by his treatment, the failure of his treatment, and periods of hospitalisation; a serious downhill slide as the warm weather continued too long.  I watched the final of the Cricket World Cup at his bedside in hospital, one of the last real times he was the Dad he'd always been, but sick (contrast: the sick Dad of later months).  I spent Autumn bitterly consumed by what to do about my job. It was coming a distant third behind my family and my pregnancy and I couldn't focus.  I took parental leave early on 1 May, worried that time with Dad was very limited and worried about Mum. Though the warm weather lingered unseasonably, it suddenly and unexpectedly snowed in Hawke's Bay in May, the first time in over 20 years.

Winter came in two parts: travelling to be with Mum and Dad, and waiting for W to arrive following my 36th week of pregnancy. It was a period of stabilisation for Dad and we adjusted to his new normal, making the most of the glimpses of Dad we could unearth.  He made the heavens move in order to come to Auckland one final time and meet his grandson, born in the middle of a storm and newly emerged into wintry sunshine.

Spring came with the final deterioration.  It was the best Spring on record in Hawke's Bay on record, they say. The most sunshine hours and the most rain.  The trees on the farm grew prolifically, the neglected garden burgeoned with flowers in a final display for Dad, whose eyes could no longer see it.  

one week, two days on

 I see Dad's legs in shorts and jandals all the time, as they were before the diagnosis.  

For the party, I gathered some photographs for a slideshow.  It killed me, of course, but thanks to the pictures I now I see him in my mind's eye as he was prior to the diagnosis.  Those pictures shelved the images of muscle wasting, facial bloating, hair loss, gathered over nearly a year. It's his legs and the backs of his heels I see the most, though. Like he's standing over there, just by the garage. Walking away, perhaps. The back of his head.

Mum sleeps on his side of the bed. She constructs a pillow wall to hug.  She feels like he'll back from a business trip soon. God, she's going to to be so lonely. She already is, I think, though W and I are still here.

I'm going through a weird period of OK. This is life now without Dad, without his disease. This is what it looks like. We just get on with it. I don't know if this phase will last.

party and a full stop

Dad didn't want a funeral.  I'll be dead and I'll be gone and put me in a cardboard box and send me straight to the crematorium. We had a party instead (he's dead and he's gone and we can do whatever we damn well please).

It was the oddest day. We kept looking round for him amongst the guests, enjoying himself. It was exactly the kind of party he enjoyed - a casual bbq hosted at his house in the sunshine with relatives and friends and wine from that lovely local winery down the road that does the good platters. When I looked for him, I was startled each time to lay eyes on two of his nephews, in their late 30s/early 40s.  They look just like him.  

I didn't cry much during the party, except with one of Dad's sisters and his brother.  I wept after, with the realisation that I'd been to my father's fucking wake, that was it, he's never coming back again. Even now I expect him to walk in from the garage, or pull up on the tractor, or even be in the shitting hospital bed in the living room.  But he's past tense now and it is brutal, bald.

The dust from the party has settled.  W and I are the only guests remaining at my parents' house (my mother's house, singular possessive). We took back the party hire equipment yesterday and now what? It is raining. Life must start to go on without him, in the new era After Dad. 

the end

On a Monday, just before 5pm, I kissed Dad, told him I loved him and I'd see him soon. We left the hospice to bathe and put W to bed.

The phone rang. His breathing's changed, they said. We think you should come in.

I couldn't. 

W was asleep in bed. I knew what was likely to happen, but I couldn't bring myself to leave the baby with someone else, or to wake him and bring him with me and risk a meltdown at the hospice.  My sister K and my mother departed in a hurry. 

I sat in the window of Dad's house, watching the sun set over his favourite view, while he breathed his last. I wasn't with him when he died. But then, I don't think he was there either.  For all intents and purposes, he'd already gone.

I've missed him for months.  I'll miss him forever.

RHB, 2 October 1956 - 23 November 2015.

no more

Mum forgot to take her cellphone to the hospice this morning. She called me at 11.30 when she came home for lunch, a little more composed.

Dad didn't recognise her.

He's not eating, barely drinking.  Sleeping, mostly.  Slipping closer to unconsciousness.

W and I are on a plane tomorrow, 8 days after our last return.  There was still discussion of Dad coming home during that visit, at least for a while. I had doubts about the feasibility of that plan and knew that I would return sooner than the next trip arranged for 2 December.  I booked our flights yesterday, mostly out of worry for Mum. Even though I knew (I knew) things were ending, I didn't expect that call today.

It might be as long as a couple of weeks, they say.  

Mum thinks he's comfortable -- at least, he doesn't seem tense or anxious. I choose to believe that inside his head, where the tumour is growing and destroying his functioning, he is replaying happy memories. He and I spent a lot of time over these past 11 months reminiscing and laughing.  He has lived a good life.

I told him I loved him the last time I saw him and he knew it was true. He said I love you very much, too. 

Even if I could talk with him one last time, many more times, forever, it would never, ever be enough.

november online

I am here, here I am. 

My technological issues are now sorted and I am back, bursting with so many words I hardly know where to begin.  

In brief:

- my son W is four months old. 

- my dad is still alive.  Just.

I think those are the most important things. My life revolves around W (or Fink, if you prefer. As in Rat Fink, the finky wee boy he is), trying to support Mum as best I can and spending time with Dad. 

Other, less important matters of note since we spoke last:

- postpartum is no joke. 

- P has taken to fatherhood like a pig in muck, no surprises there. He's a gem.

- I'm trying to write a select committee submission on the medically assisted suicide provisions of a new bill in Parliament. I want my lawyer self to do it, applying her reasoned and dispassionate mind, but my emotional self is a giant hindrance.

- Fink is adorable and I want to say so many trite things about motherhood and our relationship that have been said a million times before but oh! I didn't understand them before there was a Finky in my life! 

- Work, motherhood, parental leave: I've been thinking (yes, it hurt).

No doubt all of the above will be explored in days to come, now I've been enabled with access to this here blog and the means to write. Why yes, I've no doubt this blog will smack of tedious mumsiness, but it has always been more personal journal than anything else, so no surprises there. I mum, therefore I wax mumsical. It will also be mournful, I expect. 

I've missed this.