LAGO VISTA, TX — It’s time for my blog to shave its head.
I nearly shaved my head yesterday, thinking about the movie “The Namesake,” in which the son shaves his head after his father dies. Instead, I cut it short.
My father lives, but sense of what’s coming weighs so heavily upon me that every day I wake up with a back ache. My shoulders ache, my hips ache, my heart aches.
This time feels like a reverse pregnancy … and I feel like I have been pregnant with life and death for two solid years.
Last year, I was seven months pregnant when we found out. I’d called home, feeling happy because our latest ultrasound exam had shown that our baby was just about certainly normal. At Christmas, a series of blood tests had suggested (strongly) that Ryder could have a chromosome problem. Rather than risk an amniocentesis, we decided to wait and see how he developed. If there were problems, they would soon show. But that day, we’d been given good news … normal size, normal structures, probably normal baby.
I called Dad that night on my way home from a meeting. “I’ve got good news,” I said.
“I’ve got lung cancer,” he said, the words grinding out harshly into the night.
That was 14 months ago. In the world of lung cancer, he’s survived much longer than most people with a Stage IV diagnosis … the average is 8 to 10 months … about as long as a pregnancy. Pregnant with death.
He’s done so well … weathered chemotherapy and horrible pain, muscle loss and mucus, his lungs filling with fluid and being drained, the ever-shrinking boundaries of his world.
But now, it appears, he is going into labor. Each morning now, my mom coaches him into breathing … clearing out the various plugged airways, easing his panic, reminding him to inhale through his nose.
Two weeks ago, I said, “How are you doing, Dad?”
He said, “Well, life is better than the alternative.”
That is still mostly true, but this laboring is a sign that the life force that is my father is too big and too robust to be contained inside his ever-weakening body for much longer. A birthing of sort is going to happen … and with it pain, wrenching grief, and yet, relief.
