Sometimes the hardest thing to accept is
the very thing you’ve spent weeks, months, or even years bracing yourself for.
You’ve worked to prepare yourself
mentally so that when the news comes you’re able to maintain your composure no
matter the setting.
You’ve fortified your heart so that when
your mind is no longer up to the challenge it will step in and rescue you from
yourself.
You’ve told yourself that her leaving is
for the best because you know that asking her to stay, even if it’s just for a
little while longer, is a selfish thing to do. Selfish, when you think about
it, was just one of those things she didn’t even know how to be.
But then your mind starts to drift.
Did she know how much you loved her?
Of course she did, you tell yourself. And
you believe it, for the most part.
Is she in Heaven?
You hope she is. You want her to be. But
that’s an answer only Heaven knows which means there’s just one way to be
certain and you’re not ready for that kind of certainty. Not yet.
You remember the denim footstools that
she’d made out of juice cans more than a decade ago. It’s a weird idea, if you think about it. But
weird is how genius finds a way to reveal itself to the world, and everyone who
has ever seen those footstools has loved them. And now the one footstool has
dried toothpaste on it because your son uses it to reach the sink when he
brushes his teeth. Man that kid is messy.
She’d love, that even after all of these
years, you’re still using them. She was big into homemade stuff things like the
footstools. And blankets. And sugary goodies like caramel popcorn and peanut
brittle.
Who’s going to make the peanut brittle,
you wonder. And the noodles she made for holiday meals? You’ll never have
homemade noodles like the ones she made ever again. Unless someone has the
recipe. You hope someone has the recipe. And as you go through all the possibilities
in your mind of who might have the recipe you realize that it won’t matter. Their noodles will not be her noodles. So you decide unless the
noodles are spaghetti noodles you’ll never eat another noodle again.
Your Grandma the best spaghetti. It was
a simple recipe, really, and yet you could never master it yourself. You vow
not to eat spaghetti ever again, either. Which is good because you’ve put on
more than a few pounds in the last year and have outgrown your best suit which
is your best suit by default because it’s your only suit which means you have
to hurry out and buy a next-best suit to wear when you help pull her out of the
back of the hearse and carry her to her final resting spot before saying one
last goodbye to her in a few days. But at least you don’t have to worry about
finding a bag to match your shoes, so that’s good, right?
And as the years come and go through
your thoughts you can’t shake the one question that seemingly haunts you: What
happens to Christmas?
You sit for a long time letting that one
sink in. The truth is that nothing happens to Christmas. But it’s not the kind
of nothing that results from everything staying the same but the kind of
nothing that happens when everything changes.
You want to scream “This isn’t fair!”
but you know that cancer, like life, is anything but fair. Fair is an illusion
you cling to when life does or does not work out in a way that benefits you,
which isn’t an illusion she’d want you to have because selfish wasn’t one of
those things she knew how to be, remember?
