the inevitable

maria has breast cancer, aggressive, triple negative, but early-ish. friday she starts chemotherapy. then, at some point, she’ll have a mastectomy. I feel like I'm watching from somewhere outside myself. i want grip everyone by the collar and shake: this should be rote by now. it’s just the other shoe dropping, as shoes do. suck it up. we’ve been here before. of course you’re changed forever. of course people see cancer now. you are cancer now. suck it up. this isn’t special. you aren’t special. you aren’t fucking special. you’ll live.

brains are so fucking good at protecting us from the things we don’t want to face. protecting us from confronting the reality that watching our parents eventually die is far more terrifying than dying ourselves. because some of us were under the impression we would die first. not usher our parents from whatever this is to the inevitable nothing. your aren't fucking special. you’ll die.

1 day 12 hours 35 minutes: last blog & testament

bags are packed, papers are in order. heather and i were going to write a will but somehow the month slipped away from me. my surgery is in less than 48 hours. so since none of ya'll are crazy, not even rory lately, here's the basics of what i want on the off off off chance that something bad happens during surgery.

• save me if i can be saved. pull the plug if i'm brain dead. 
• i'm having champagne and strawberry poptarts for dinner tonight. (just thought you should know!)
• i don't want a funeral but i do want a party. a large party. everyone should get rip-roaring drunk and gorge themselves on amazing food. people should have sex in the swimming pool at this party. (i don't know what swimming pool, you pick the venue). brett, you are in charge of music. under no circumstances can danny be in charge of this. he can make a request but it has to be approved by brett. mara, amanda, please make your breasts available for danny to cry in.
• donate my body to stanford. i don't think they can take any of my organs because of my treatment but they should be able to use me for med school. heather, when they're done with me, that white dress hanging in my closet, the $34 wedding dress, cremate me in it. let danny see it first.  
• everyone that loves me needs to love the hell out of my kids. share them. take them to see every fucking corner of the earth. if you are part of my life now, stay a part of their lives.
• request that you be given ALL of my ashes so that there are plenty to go around. any time anyone goes anywhere have them take some of them so that *i* get to visit every corner of the earth. seriously, leave a piece of me in sicily but also at that target in westgate.  
• no reason to argue over my stuff: divide it between the kids. heather, you're in charge of this too. i mean, everyone else take something that's special to you but the big stuff (house/car/money) - take care of the kids.
• keep the business in fourths. 

wherein i cry in the car, for not the first time

because my 93.5 year old grandmother asks me if i plan to marry danny and an answer in the affirmative welcomes a promise of the wedding band and engagement ring she's worn for over 70 years. *le sigh* but in a good way.

the dice was loaded from the start

i grow up with a sister not my own. amanda is the unsubtractable piece of myself that has always been there, an appendage, relevant. easy. necessary. emily becomes my sister in circumstance; unpoken common experience transferable only through osmosis. maybe they make me lazy in girlfriendship - certainly it's easier to wield power with a boy or maybe there's no reason to struggle with a girl, or amazing girls like these in any case.

in any case, it takes me almost 25 more years to meet girlfriends and i must let my guard down because before -what changed?- i would have judged them both. too loose. too religious. too comfortable in her own skin. too uncomfortable in her own skin. threatening. we've apparently walked miles and miles and miles around this track because i wake up in the middle of my family reunion less abrasive (still navel-gazing).

the conversation begins with circumcision and inevitably strays to abortion. we're polite, tearful. i give credit to colleen for teaching me two things i might never have learned without her: how to reach into a womb not my own and how to stretch-fight fair. because its less about the fight and more about the common ground we can find here. let her walk forward as the shining banner of Catholicism (and all Christianity for that manner, morality, intelligence and compartmentalized-beautiful womanhood). let me be be a rusty signpost for atheism.

i'm sorry you had to make that decision. i'm sorry you regret it. i love you. i respect you. i'm illogical. i'm crazy. i'm prone to drawing fuzzy-ambiguous lines. i've changed. don't pigeonhole me. i love you. i'm sorry.