"Cure"

On nights like this, I wish I had someone I could run to. Someone I could fall apart to. Someone who would wrap me in his arms and not even try to convince me everything would be okay, because he was smart enough to know that it wouldn’t be. But who would sit there in the silence with me.

“Is there a cure?” is one of the first things people ask when you tell them your father has cancer. And I hate the answer.
I had a nightmare last night, one part of which involved me knowing that I was only going to live for one more day. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine what it must feel like to not be certain that you’d be around tomorrow? I experienced that feeling in a dream, for a brief amount of time. And it was an awful feeling.

Yet, every night when my Dad goes to bed, he’s not sure if he’ll wake up the next day.

And as I sit here with burning eyes, the most painful throbbing in my head and that familiar ache in my chest, it breaks my heart to think of how my Dad must feel.

Occasionally he jokes that one day he may just wake up dead.

Not too long ago at a hotel I woke up my mother because I wasn’t sure my Dad was breathing.

Pure panic shot through me as I studied his form in the dark hotel room. I got out of the starch sheets that clung to me and woke up my mom. Half asleep she reassured me that he was breathing and to go back to sleep. But I was never asleep in the first place and certainly couldn’t sleep after that.

Anyway, I do my best not to dwell on all of this…but when I see like eleven different pill bottles on the kitchen table, when I hear him coughing or see him buying/doing these great things for me because “who knows how much time I have left,” its hard not to think about.

“There is no cure,” I found myself saying to one of my friends. “It can only end one way.”

Which I can’t really believe I admitted, but it’s the truth.

I just simply cannot imagine life without him. My two very best friends are my parents, they are a piece of me and they are the people I would choose to spend time with over anyone else.

So I find myself not thinking about all of this most of the time, (emotional) self-preservation if you will. But it’s always there, the shadow in the corner of the room. And sometimes it is overwhelming. So logically of course, as an only child, here I am writing about it.

-Psalm 103:2-