Injustice

I feel the urge to write, yet I am struggling to find the words to convey my thoughts and emotions. Today was the hardest of days. Worse than the day when I learned that my mother had cancer, worse than the day we learned the cancer was back and far worse than the day we learned that it would someday take her life. Though I know there are darker days ahead.

Somewhere along the line I accepted that as fate would have it cancer would take my mother from this world. Until today I was able to compartmentalize that loss into the back of my mind as some distant event that would happen someday, not today or tomorrow, not even soon. My mother is a fighter, not for herself, but for everyone else. Her will to put others first has been her weapon of choice against this horrific disease and when she ran out of ammunition then I would fight for her.

Somehow though this disease takes hold of every part of you - even the insanity that is putting yourself last over all others. My mother has made that choice every day of her life, the choice that puts her second to all the ones that she loves and there are many of us. She has spent her life sacrificing little pieces of herself so that her loved ones would be whole.

The injustice of how her life will end is unbearable and knowing in advance how it ends far worse. I feel like a volcano on the verge of erupting. My emotions bubbling to the surface and trickling out like molten lava, at times bursting into the air and erasing bits and pieces of the landscape that once represented my hope for a miracle, all the while threatening to explode with devastating destruction.

I wanted so badly for my mother to be one of the few, very lucky metastatic breast cancer patients that regains some semblance of a life and lives many more years than they'd ever hoped were possible. I secretly hoped that she would live to see my son, now five, get his license, go to prom and maybe even attend his high school graduation.

My mother is frail. She is a shell of the woman that she once was, she is weak and worse she feels like a burden and she is terrified (her eyes betray her). Her disease or the treatment, which she is no longer strong enough to tolerate, or both have taken so much from her. Now we must shift our focus to the time that we have left and making the best of it together.

And so I worry that my son will be robbed of the love and the light that she would bring to his life. That she won't make it to see her newest grandchildren talk or walk. That somehow I must find a way to help my son understand and accept that which no child should ever face.

Watching my mother suffer as she does, unable to lessen her pain is a living hell. To imagine a world without my mother is unbearable. Her loss will ruin me...without her I will never be whole.