Unexpected Endings: One Thing Leads to Another

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

One Thing Leads to Another

Yesterday's inbox included this email from my friend Vivien Arnold:

The picture of you and your sisters reminds me of this photo of my mom and her sisters, from back in the days when girls were sent to tap-dancing school! My mother is the youngest, perhaps 5 or 6 here. She lost both her sisters to cancer too - one in her 40s (back in the 1960s). It broke her heart. But of course their lives were not all about cancer - as with your sisters too! There was so much that is hilarious in her memories of them.

Thanks for opportunity to share this. I dig the blog!

Vivien

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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.