It is small now. Everything is small now. The days are smaller. Time is smaller. The goals are smaller.
The daylight in Jersey City is smaller now.
The circle of friends is smaller.
The general consensus is don’t show up now crying and waving Bibles. If you ain’t been here through it all, all this hell, don’t show up now.
Word
This is a tough crowd, don’t test us…
A life so full of life. A life so full of excited, albeit, at times crazy ideas, but so full. So full of the shining essence of this miracle we call life…
So full
Now reduced to naps between bouts of pain.
And meds and more pain.
The morphine, the twenty-four-hour morphine ain’t cutting it.
There used to be no bad days, at least by comparison. Then there were one or two between chemo, but we took them because there were ten-twelve-fourteen days of good.
You were a miracle on the loose.
On fire.
Doctors were perplexed.
We watched and smiled. If anyone was going to beat this it was you.
It’s so big. But, so are you.
This you. This all powerful – you.
My daughter asked me last night how it was going.
I cried again.
I told her I think I figured out why people die. We die when the bad days win.
The two weeks of good days have given way to a week of good and two days of bad.
Then five good and three bad. Then one not so bad and two pretty damn bad.
The goals are so small now.
Your goal is Thanksgiving now. Not thanksgiving with all of us and your sister and twenty pies.
Thanksgiving maybe with some soup, if you can keep it down.
I want to scream at the phone, “Thanksgiving is only a month away! What the fuck are you talking about?”
Then I recall the climb, pushing that massive boulder up the bigger and bigger hill.
The hill seems to be getting steeper. Suddenly it appears to be straight up.
No one ever pushed harder than you. No one ever could.
The game has changed, we fear the hill now. It has started to loom huge and out of control. The hill is in charge now.
The hill has a name. Its name is cancer.
The chemo is stopped, the cancer now runs this show, unbridled and unchecked. The cancer grows large now, as everything else tightens into a smaller and smaller circle.
I watch you wince in pain as I see it, the cancer, squeeze out what is left of the light.
The time for anger has even passed. All that remains is agony.
When you’ve lost the desire and ability to pray what do you do, cross your fingers?
Prayer and crossed fingers seem pointless now. We just watch the cancer grow. The hill too high, too steep to climb.
Please, don’t today, challenge me once again with your “will of God” story. I want no part of the God responsible for this, or his plan.
Everything is small now.
