Where I’ve Been
Amtrak somewhere in Delaware — Last week, I ran into a friend who promptly asked, “Where have you been?”
9 months ago my mother got sick. A month later, the diagnosis was cancer. A month after that, we learned it was terminal. Nobody was more shocked than my mother. After all, she reasoned, her mother was turning 100 this year. Why wouldn’t she live for another 25 years?
The decline has been precipitous. She’s always tired. During two treatments of chemotherapy she reminded me of Nicholson’s MacMurphy after he was lobotomized in the final scene of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Towards my grandmother’s birthday in May, she regained some strength and was able to stand and deliver a lovely toast. She went to work frequently for a while working on staff issues and thinking about a transition. But this past month it’s been more days in the hospital than at home.
When I was 10, I asked my mother a lot of questions about death. My other grandmother was sick and, like many kids, I was trying to understand mortality. My mother told me, “If I ever get really sick, I think it would be better to just jump off a bridge. I’d be doing it for you of course. Watching people die is horrible.”
Jet forward 33 years and it turns out my mother is fighting it with family support. My dad has left her exactly one night in 9 months. My sister, a nurse, flies home for a week nearly every month and I ride the train to DC frequently. For a time, I competed for the FourSquare mayorship at Johns Hopkins.
So Where Have I Been? Working in New York or traveling to Israel and California. I’ve been at Little League games and out to dinners with my wife. I’ve been to the Catskills for 4th of July. But mostly I’ve been lost in thought. Not entirely anywhere.
Notes
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