Wednesday, December 15, 2004

sad

It is so late and I ought to be in bed, but I have to make cupcakes for W’s preschool tomorrow and I just got off the phone with my mother and I am so sad and I wish there was someone here to hold me or just to talk to, but there isn’t.
My cousin Robyn in Florida is finally dying. They are bringing her home from the hospital tomorrow, and it could be hours or maybe a couple of weeks at the most. She is only in her fifties, but the cancer came on so fast and was so bad that there wasn’t much they could do about it. The really terrible irony is that she was always a very healthy person, a massage therapist. The last time I saw her was about six months ago and she was already very sick from the chemo, but she was still beautiful and ethereal looking.

She has always had the most beautiful hands- small but with long smooth fingers that looked delicate but were very strong. And she has lovely clear grey eyes and she laughed and laughed and loves animals and children and art and is very kind and funny and clever. We have all had such good times together, she and my mother and her daughter Gretchen and I. Isnt it funny how things that make you so happy and are such GOOD memories can become so painful to you for just those reasons in the blink of an eye?

I emailed Gretchen and told her if she needs me to come down to help her either practically or for moral support,that I will be there, and I will. I HATE not being able to just drop everything and go now, but I cant. My mother is in Ohio with her broken arm and she cannot go either. My brother’s second baby is due to be born any day and Robyn told my mother to stay to be there when the baby is born. She said that if she passes it, she will give it a hug along the way. My mother told me that and we both started to cry on opposite ends of the phone.

I am crying now and trying to be quiet so I don’t wake W up. Some things in this life are just sad and wrong and it is hard to find any good in them, and this is one of them. I am one of the practical ones in the family. We are good at funerals and things like that; we bring homemade bread and food and quietly organize and clear up after everyone leaves and make cups of tea and look at old pictures. But I feel bereft, and it makes me realize that somehow throughout this past year of her being so ill, I have been pushing it away so that I didn’t have to be sad about it, because there have been so many other things to worry about. Now it is coming down to my not being able to do that, and I have to just BE sad and get that aside, so that I can be useful when the time comes and try to find some comfort in that because I don’t feel ANY otherwise.

And selfishly I hate being alone right now. I just want someone to hold me and to curl up around me and smooth my hair back while I cry and tell me it will be all right, even if it really isn’t. I cant think of anyone to call on the phone at this time of night who is close enough to come over and just… be here with me. And I hate that. I wish that I was not on my own tonight. I almost want to wake W up just for the company, I am feeling so down, but that would only scare him and make me regret it at a quarter to six tomorrow morning.

Its funny, I was reading earlier and I came across a quote from William Blake that reminded me of Robyn perfectly. I have to remember to send it to Gretchen:

‘He whose face gives no light will never become a star.’

Some night soon I will look up at the sky, and my cousin will be shining there. She has given so much light already.

Ok, very tired, very down, still have cupcakes to make before bed…


2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Oh no :( I'm so sorry. I wish I could be there to talk to you and make you tea, but all I can do is give you some Roethke, because the last time I was upset you gave him to me and it was a comfort, even if only a small one:

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.


A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.


Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

- guen

4:40 PM  
Blogger Kristin said...

*sending you happy thougts*

12:53 PM  

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