Now Comes the Hard Part

My brother has written some phenomenal blog posts lately so I have linked to them for anyone who is reading this who does not already check my brother's blog. Fragile Moments and In Its Weakest Sense. I share the sentiment though our lives are very different and we are in very different places. His words bring up more emotion than I know what to do with. The thing about being sober for me that I find most overwhelming is the ability to feel the things that he writes about. Before I might have understood them, on an intellectual level, yet the meaning is lost when you can't actually feel it. It is really with a deep sense of sadness that I am writing tonight. Reality hits me in waves that almost knock me over. It never eases in slowly. My brother leaves the U.S. today and I am surprised by just how sad this makes me. After all these months and everything I have been through - a new job, getting married, surviving breast cancer, ending my relationship - all experiences shared virtually entirely via instant message, it was more than a little comforting to be in the same place for a while.

The hard part was not surviving cancer - it wasn't the process that was difficult or all of the things that were done to my body. It wasn't my hair falling out, or being tired, or my skin being burned or losing feeling in my feet. The hard part is living in the emotional aftermath and this is hard even though the prognosis is good and the damage to my body, with my fertility hopefully in tact, is minimal. It is also with tremendous fear that I am writing. Like the rest of the emotion, it is overwhelming at times and subsists despite my best efforts at at burying it and avoiding it. I miss my brother, who is my family, more than ever now. At a time when I feel closer to him than I ever have, and I have considered us to be close all of our adult lives, I feel the tremendous distance between us and it saddens me that we don't have the ability to share more moments in person right now. These are the most significant times of our lives, they are the most meaningful times, they are the most real to me. They hold the most significance because I can appreciate them where so many other moments were lost. They should be savored and they should be shared, not across distances and via email. Our lives become busier and we move in different directions, farther apart and we meet in the middle less and less frequently. It worries me for the future.

The reality that plagues me is knowing that my time may really be limited and that I won't know it until it is virtually too late. I have heard from other people who have survived similar life threatening illnesses who face the possibility of recurrence, and recurrence often means death, that no matter how good the outlook is, this feeling is inescapable. It runs beneath and intertwines itself - it tangles itself up with everything. They say it is like walking around with a hatchet hanging above your head and you don't know whether or when it is going drop. As time passes the hatchet gets higher and higher but it never goes away. It always hangs above your head. You see it in the background of your experiences, in the photographs in your minds eye. It gives you gratitude and an ability to appreciate life yet everything seems somehow tainted with desperation and urgency.

I do feel a definite sense of urgency in the need I feel to change the way I live my life. I cling to the time I just spent with my brother as if they are the last moments that I will have with them, knowing too well how life can change in a split second. I am overwhelmed constantly by a feeling that I simply don't have time. I don't have any more time to waste and I don't know how much time I have to share either. Trey - I love you and Rachel and Ellis. Thank you for all of your support over the years. If it weren't for you, I would not have survived our childhood. I'm so grateful that I got to spend some time with you over the holidays. I miss you guys more than I realized.