Unexpected Endings: One Mushroom

Monday, February 28, 2011

One Mushroom

I just started this blog, and new reasons to feel sad are popping up like mushrooms. Here’s one: I can write anything I want about what it was like in our family when I was a little girl, and there’s no one left to say it wasn’t so.

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WHAT YOU'RE GETTING INTO

My sister’s leukemia had returned. I made plans to fly to Illinois to visit Martha and my mother, who, Martha told me, was becoming seriously forgetful lately. By the time I arrived, Martha was close to death, and my mother’s life, dementia and all, suddenly, unexpectedly, landed in my lap. This is the mother I had moved across the country to be far enough away from. What kind of weird destiny gave her back to me to have all to myself, when I started out life sharing her with 3 sisters?

And where were my sisters when I needed them so much?

At 58, I am already older than any of them were when they were diagnosed. I live with the question what kind of cancer will I get and when will I find out I have it? On the other hand, if I live long enough, my ending could look like my mother’s. Hmm…which to choose?

Life really does end. We really don’t have any security, and my story has forced that knowledge on me. And I find myself surprised. But also grateful.

This blog is me asking the questions that I don’t have answers to, as I keep soldiering on – daughter number three, who just couldn’t make herself fit the fundamentalist Christian family she was born into.

Monday, February 28, 2011

One Mushroom

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