I'm back in NY after a week in Colorado, where we spent most of our time in a hospital and then, finally, at home with Grandpa while he moves through the very late stages of an aggressive cancer. We've known this was coming, but for me, at least, it still felt far away. Like we'd still have time.
And now suddenly - but also not-so-suddenly - here we are. We've pivoted, in a way, from buying time to biding time. From talking about cancer and drugs and doctors to telling stories and asking questions and squirreling away every detail - every memory - of a big, broad, beautiful life.
And it just sucks. It sucks to watch someone you love fall away from himself a little at a time. It sucks to watch my grandmother slowly and painfully say goodbye to a man she's loved her whole life. It sucks to know that I'll be back soon for a very different kind of visit. It sucks, it sucks, it sucks. And then, of course, at some point, it will suck even more. And later, it will still suck, but it will sting a little less.
It's in these moments - these hard and inevitable and just plain terrible moments - that I feel myself cling even more to stories. I brought my audio kit with me on this trip, and we recorded EVERYTHING. Mom, joking with her dad. Grandpa, telling us for the hundredth time about the day he and Grandma snuck off to New Mexico so they could get married after school (they were just teenagers!) more than 60 years ago. Grandma, laughing at her husband for "telling the story wrong."
These stories - these snippets of life in between all the sad and the scary - are the ones I know we'll want to hold onto. Not the hospitals and the doctors and the cancer talk and the general blergh-ness that is so thick with us right now. I know we'll want the happy bits. So I'll collect them, quietly, while everything else swirls heavy around us. Someday, I hope, I'll be able to share them.
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