June 10th will always be a hard day for me. 4 years ago my mom died of a hemorrhage after having brain surgery when her breast cancer spread. She first developed Stage 1 Breast Cancer shortly before my 18th birthday and had a lumpectomy and chemo and radiation and finally went into remission. Not too long after I turned 20 she was diagnosed with Inflammatory Breast Cancer. IBC is automatically considered Stage 4 as it does not have a tumor that can be removed. She had another round of chemo, but as the IBC was on the same side as the cancer she had previously, she was not able to have radiation again. She had a double mastectomy and two more rounds of chemo, and started to have reconstructive surgery.
She went on vacation to visit a friend and I was headed to Vegas to celebrate my 22nd birthday. My mom called to tell me Happy Birthday, which if you knew her was extremely out of character. She sounded tired, but just said she had a bit of headache when I asked her about it. She chalked it up to the travel (she had driven from Southern California to Oregon for her vacation). She got home and was still having the headaches and they were as bad as any migraine she’d had over the years. After one particularly bad night, my dad made her go to the ER, and they found that the cancer had spread and she had a tumor at the base of her skull which was causing the pain. The did surgery to remove it, and after a few days she was sent home. After about a week, she was still draining pretty heavily from the surgery and the fluids were still foggy and cloudy so she was readmitted into ICU so she could be monitored. June 9th was a Saturday and her doctors had said that her draining was looking good, and they were going to release her and send her home on Monday. The hospital she was in only discharged from ICU Monday – Friday and they wanted to be absolutely certain that the draining was clear and minimal. She was laughing and joking with all of us, and when I snuck down to the vending machines I brought up a can of pineapple chunks and when I got back up to the room with them, she mentioned that they looked amazing. I remember starting off thinking ‘eh, I’ll just give them to her and eat what she doesn’t want.’ She devoured the whole can and just had this look on her face like they were the best thing she had ever eaten. Then made a crack about my having a big enough ass that walking back to the cafeteria area wouldn’t kill me if I wanted another can, and my nephew seized the opportunity to drag my dad to the vending machines (he was 9 at the time and liked pushing the elevator buttons) and to explore. While he was gone my mom made me promise to force him to go home that night, “because the nurse have got to be tired of seeing him by now” so I did. Finally around 2am, I managed to convince him to leave. I followed him home and told him that since I had some things to do the next morning that if he came home after he finished church I would go with him to the hospital. He got up a couple hours earlier than he usually did for his sunday service to be able to go to the hospital beforehand to say good morning to my mom (yes, they were THAT couple, but that’s a whole other story) and not even five minutes after he left our house phone rang. I per our house rules ignored it with the motto: “well if it’s important they’ll leave a message.” Then about 15 minutes later my cell phone rang and my dad told me to come down to the hospital. My mom had hemorrhaged and bled out right around the time my dad woke up. The call that I didn’t answer? The hospital calling telling my dad to come down there. The nurses conveniently “couldn’t find” the DNR paperwork my mom signed on admission and put her on life support until we could get there. We waited for family to get there and then they took her off life support. I won’t delve into those details, because I’m fully unprepared to deal with reliving that experience. But suffice it to say, that was that.
Now I don’t mention this for wanting anyone to feel sorry for me, or any kind of attention garnering; that is the way things happened and there is no changing them. But this year, more than most, I’m having a very hard time with this, so it’s simply my way of saying if I’m quiet or moody here’s why. I debated with publishing this and the next portion that I wrote a few days ago with no intent of letting anyone see it, but I figured that those who cared to read it could, and those who didn’t wouldn’t, and in the end I needed to get it out and well, it’s my blog. :P
Madre,
Yes, I know you hated my calling you that and yes that was the reason I always did. Wow, it’s been 4 years already? Some days it feels like just yesterday and some days it feels like a fucking eternity. I still miss you so goddamn much. I know we didn’t really have the best of relationships at for quite a while, but right now I would take any amount of bruises for the chance to talk to you again. I just feel like so many things would have turned out differently if you were still here. Regardless of how stubborn I am, I wouldn’t have gotten married so quickly if I wasn’t afraid that you wouldn’t be there for it. That was the only reason I was so easily talked into it. I never told you that I didn’t want to get married, I was just afraid that by the time I wanted to, you wouldn’t be there for it. And hell, you would have beat sense into me about that relationship long before anyone else ever had the balls to even try. That or you would have castrated him the first time he cheated and left. And at the first sign of what I now realize was some severely fucked up emotional beating and mind fucking, you would have gutted him and buried him in the backyard. Or at the least threatened him since you knew he was terrified of you. But hey, I wised up eventually, and you always said I had to learn the hard way. And guess what? I’m happy for once. Honestly happy, not the fake happy you always called me on. I just wish you could meet the person making me smile. You’d like him I think (and no, not JUST because you could talk music and he’d actually know who you were talking about) but mostly I wish he could meet you. I just keep telling myself that everything that happened was for a reason and if everything hadn’t happened the way it did I would still be miserable and likely not be a giddy, grinning idiot like I am and worse not able to appreciate what I have now.
I did only keep half my promise to you though, and for that I’m sorry. I make the effort with dad despite his business, but I’m sorry things didn’t turn out that way with Gabe. I miss his kids so much, and I hate that he has one that I’ve never met. I don’t like feeling like I don’t have a brother, especially with how close we used to be. I know my moving to Vegas didn’t help, but I couldn’t stay in California. It was too hard and too many memories with you, I just couldn’t do it. And I realize now it was also part of the plan to get me away from everyone that would have tried to talk sense into me. Dad marrying Grace just finished the wall between us. I couldn’t forgive him for not letting Calvin be in the wedding simply because of Grace’s age, it was so petty and it hurt dad so much, and Gabe wasn’t there after you died, he didn’t see dad and how sick he got until he started dating Grace. And I know you’d love her even if she is a total dork and she makes dad happy and that’s all you cared about. Plus, hey, you were right and told him he’d get remarried even if he said he never would. I’m just sorry that I didn’t do a better job of keeping everyone together like you did. I tried, I really did, but it was all I could do to keep myself together and dad healthy and I didn’t have enough strength for everyone else.
Despite how much I miss you and wish you were here, I’m able to focus now on the more important things and how I could make you proud. I know you realized it towards the end but I am a good person, perhaps a little too easily hurt and I know I care too much about people liking me, but I’m working on developing your talent for not giving a shit about it. I will always be too nice, but I like to think you’d appreciate my not getting bitter about everything. I do love you and miss you and I really wish we could have been friends for longer. I’ve missed you occasionally popping up in my dreams so feel free to do that again, it would be nice to hear your voice. I promise I’ll keep an eye on dad and I’ll work on Gabe and sucking up my stubbornness when it comes to him. Tell grandpa and kristen I said hi.
<3
