my mom has been my dad's first line of cancer defense day and night for two and a half years. she has been there for every moment, every set back and triumph, every single bad thing that has happened and also for all the good days. combine this with the fact that she has also been the mouthpiece, the one who tells us kids what is happening and where my dad is at, and it has been a roller coaster ride. every few days something will happen and my mom will text us that dad will die soon, maybe in the next couple days. i checked my phone last night to a text saying that my dad could barely breathe and that he was saying that if he went to sleep he wouldn't wake up. i called my mom and she said she thought he had hours, but possibly days, left. we made the decision to stay put and not go to my parents'. then this morning i get the text that he is fine, walking to the bathroom on his own and asking for food.

i think she feels an unbearable burden to keep us updated lest anything happen and one of us ends up mad at her wishing things had happened differently. i think the burden of being that mouthpiece is one of the worst parts of it for her. as a result, every fear and every worry is not a bump but a jagged roadblock. it is in the end empowering to feel her calm care and her desire that each of us grieves and says goodbye how we need to, enabled by her very honest communication. and while i sometimes think--fuck. i cannot go on like this until he passes--i think we will look back and not regret a thing.

i simultaneously feel that she is acting so strange and also feel (very strongly) that everyone grieves in their own way. when we were there last i was thinking that she seemed kind of reverted to teenagehood/singlehood/i don't even know. she spent a lot of time on her phone texting her friends, snapchatting and sending silly pictures. she went shopping for a new blow dryer and some skin products. her counselor at the hospital told her to make one good change in the midst of this passing, so she bought all new bedding and a bunch of us had a great time unfurling it all and fixing up her pillows and getting it just so. it doesn't seem that weird, but when you consider that my dad has moved to a hospital bed in the living room and will likely never sleep in that bed with her again--she was making that bed anew for her and herself alone--there is a different dimension to it.

it's all a ball of contradiction. and my mom was a ball of contradiction even in normal years. through the anxiety and the clinical depression and the--frankly--fighting and sometimes the hell of us all growing up under her sensitive and therefore controlling arm, she has always been a 21 year old at heart--a playful, rebellious, we-are-infinite believer, more than anyone else i have met. she has a young heart and soul. after my dad's funeral my mom will not be receiving anyone--no, we in the immediate family will be returning to the house for a dance party and food. there is a powerful sense of how relieved we will be, and also there is a powerful sense of her future, that she will get a life she never had--to go to school, to study, to live on her own terms, to do what she wants. that she will get a second chance on the youth that she willingly gave to my dad and to us, her kids. i suspect a lot of her acceptance of me--law school, possibly no kids--has come from her own experience of realizing she will soon be on her own and that a lady in the end has to do some things for herself--she will be, in a sense, trapped by the things she didn't do, like finish school, but also finally free to do things for her, like study anything she wants worry-free now. she raised her family and she raised us well. i think it was a hard and often dark time for her. she truly gave of herself and i have never met anyone as selfless as she has been. it's hard to convey in writing that as weird as this is, i can't blame her at all for her hope and her regeneration.

we take the weird as a very definite and important part of reality. she is ready for him to pass. OF COURSE she is. we all feel that way a little bit, but maybe not as acutely as she does. perhaps that's why it's so difficult to see my dad's denial, terror and sadness at his own mortality. my mom continues to care for him endlessly, selflessly. as ready as we are, i don't think he knows it because as ready as we are, there is no sense of anxiousness when we are with him. it is very, very squarely readiness and not impatience. perhaps that is the kind of readiness god feels. when we are in a moment with him there's a sense of eternity in the most lds-sense--a sense that those memories will never die, that that love will never end, and that we will have more moments like that together.

so yes. all of this results in a bunch of weird drama. and perhaps it will go on like this for a while that my dad will tell us he will not wake up again and then wake up and ask for yogurt. it is the ironic cost of grieving, coming to terms, and eventually of peace.