I was just sitting at the grave of my friends’ son who died slipping off a ski lift chair just a year or so ago. He was 7.
I was at the cemetery because I’ve been feeling over the last 5 days that way too many people in my immediate world are assuming I’m going to die from this latest twist in my metastatic breast cancer battle; in my lungs but also now in my liver and brain.
In the 5 days since I found out this news I’ve had my ups and downs, picking at the flower of fear like the daisy you hope will tell you someone likes you: “He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not” or in my case, “I’ll live, I’ll die, I’ll live, I’ll die..” For me, I always land on the good petal–the one where I do well with treatment and look forward to Christmas dinner with my family and friends.
But over the last 24 hours I’ve been knocked to the emotional floor by folks who are my friends who are thinking the bad petal is the given: that I’m not gonna do this. That I am gonna die–Like soon. As if I’ve already been through the treatment and it’s failed. I gotta tell you, they’re freaking me out.
So why did I go to a graveyard?
Because whenever I walk across the dewy grass to the cemetery spot where JH was laid to rest in December of 2011, I feel a strange sensation that’s both horrible and comforting: I feel like he understands my position. Who else but a little child stolen from life after only 7 years could, if he were here, look at me and say “believe me, Mrs. Paige, I get it. This stinks. Makes no sense. I get you.”
In my mind if not in my soul, right now I desperately need to be with someone who knows life isn’t fair and doesn’t need to say that to me: he represents it. And somehow for me when I stand there and weep to his gravestone– a gorgeous block-shaped, buffed, black piece of marble with the etchings of a bear and skis on it, I feel supported in my confusion by a little angel who in the 7? 10? seconds it likely took for his life to fall from the sky may have very well felt the exact way I do: “What the heck is going on?”
I actually spoke those words out loud today as I stood rearranging the flowers by his carved name, crying fearful tears. I was mumbling like mad, “Do these people around me know something I don’t? Am I a fool to believe I can do this?” I could see his little face captured in his last school photo smiling to me like “Yeah, who knows. Isn’t this rich? Who would have thought life would put us here like this?”
I can’t define it any more than to say that having someone–even in spirit–make me feel like I’m not crazy, nor am I dead (yet)– lent me relief that I desperately needed. And JH knows more than my feeble brain can tell me because I’m still just a human while he’s now part of God’s world—the Infinite Universe- where man and Science and Journals of Medicine don’t hold the answers to why people die.
Now JH knows why we die, when we die–the “real” reasons, not the “because the meds didn’t work” or “because he ate too much fried food”. Or my favorite, the “everything-happens-for-a-reason” earthly bullshit answer everyone gives when they have no other explanation of the frightening realites of how cruel life can be. Let’s face it, everything happens for a reason until your 2nd grader falls to his death skiing on a blue-skyed, bright sunny day: after that, nothing makes sense or happens for a reason in this world ever again.
I don’t want anyone to be standing at my grave weeping to me in a year; but at the same time I have to realize that I have no control over that. And thought hard to swallow I have no control over what people are saying and fearing about my cancer now. I do know this: that may be their reality, but I can’t let it be mine.
What I do have control over is my attitude. I’ll have good days and bad days, that I realize. But I control one thing and one thing only: my outlook.
As I left JH today, I kissed my hand and laid it on top of his gravestone. And I couldn’t stop myself, still frightened and insecure about my future, to out loud ask him one more thing– ”Is it over for me, is this it, is this the end?”
Like a whisper in my ear I felt an answer inside me that I had been feeling a few days ago but recent fear had squashed it down to nothing:
“Who knows. Nothing’s a guarantee. No one knows yes, no one knows no.” As I took one last look at that bear and skis on JH’s gravestone I heard one last thing: “But what else can you do but try?”
