full moon
I've been conspicuously absent from blog posting this week, and I blame it on events surrounding yesterday night's full moon. I'm really not that superstitious; but I do take very seriously the moon's cycle, and always, always, the dangers of driving.
A close family friend, a second "mother" and mentor, has gotten very ill, very suddenly, and I'm not sure how to write about it. In the six months that I have been posting to this blog, I've been careful not to expose too much about my personal life. Beside the fact that I work in a place that requires its employees to sign a confidentiality statement, and in spite of my temptation to vent the daily frustrations of twenty-something lifestyle in New York City, this will never be a tell-all weblog, or a diary. But the news of this sickness over the holiday weekend has so dramatically shifted the way I look at the city, my job and my daily dealings with people, that I felt it was only appropriate to post about it for a little.
One of the most interesting things about confronting sickness is that people make efforts to take ownership of some part of the coping process. Everyone goes into "very helpful mode." One person organizes the meals or cleans the house thoroughly, while another takes medical notes and executes all the notifying of family and friends. When you lose control to an unknown - in this case a cancer that is never predictable, and mostly incurable - you try and seize it in some other part of your life.
As a result, I've been completely antisocial this week. What I've seized as my way of coping with the news is a kind of control of my social schedule. If I don't see anyone, or call them back, I don't have to recount my hours at the hospital this weekend, and I don't have to review and retell the medical facts yet another time. It's as though it's not happening at all...until I get a call from my "second mother's" daughter, a high school classmate and friend, and all I want to do is throw myself into learning, knowing, processing whatever facts there are, finding loopholes in diagnoses, dreaming up the most thoughtful thing I can possibly provide to help personalize a hospital room.
Now that the immediate trauma of finding this all out has passed -- tears shed, best and worst case scenarios imagined, cigarettes smoked -- and the real long-term questions set in, I wonder how to incorporate it into my daily life. I can't wallow in sympathy and self-pity for long, but I also feel enormously guilty living a life while another fabulous one is unfairly confined to an airless room in an old New York hospital.
Though hopefully she had a view of the full moon, which was, for what it's worth, incredibly beautiful.
A close family friend, a second "mother" and mentor, has gotten very ill, very suddenly, and I'm not sure how to write about it. In the six months that I have been posting to this blog, I've been careful not to expose too much about my personal life. Beside the fact that I work in a place that requires its employees to sign a confidentiality statement, and in spite of my temptation to vent the daily frustrations of twenty-something lifestyle in New York City, this will never be a tell-all weblog, or a diary. But the news of this sickness over the holiday weekend has so dramatically shifted the way I look at the city, my job and my daily dealings with people, that I felt it was only appropriate to post about it for a little.
One of the most interesting things about confronting sickness is that people make efforts to take ownership of some part of the coping process. Everyone goes into "very helpful mode." One person organizes the meals or cleans the house thoroughly, while another takes medical notes and executes all the notifying of family and friends. When you lose control to an unknown - in this case a cancer that is never predictable, and mostly incurable - you try and seize it in some other part of your life.
As a result, I've been completely antisocial this week. What I've seized as my way of coping with the news is a kind of control of my social schedule. If I don't see anyone, or call them back, I don't have to recount my hours at the hospital this weekend, and I don't have to review and retell the medical facts yet another time. It's as though it's not happening at all...until I get a call from my "second mother's" daughter, a high school classmate and friend, and all I want to do is throw myself into learning, knowing, processing whatever facts there are, finding loopholes in diagnoses, dreaming up the most thoughtful thing I can possibly provide to help personalize a hospital room.
Now that the immediate trauma of finding this all out has passed -- tears shed, best and worst case scenarios imagined, cigarettes smoked -- and the real long-term questions set in, I wonder how to incorporate it into my daily life. I can't wallow in sympathy and self-pity for long, but I also feel enormously guilty living a life while another fabulous one is unfairly confined to an airless room in an old New York hospital.
Though hopefully she had a view of the full moon, which was, for what it's worth, incredibly beautiful.
posted by brad board babe at 4:28 PM
1 Comments:
The most wonderful thing about Jenn is how deeply she loves people and how selflessly she gives herself to those in her life who need her. She has learned the hard way that sadness is an inevitable part of life. But she has also learned to acknowledge that sadness, to sit with it and to accept it, while understanding that it is not forever. That she has the strength to remain open to those sad feelings, and the struggle to understand them--rather than hide from them and shut them out--is what makes her such a formidable and passionate person, a wise and fiercely loyal friend, and what will ultimately lead her to the great happiness she deserves in her own life.
She, like the moon, is incredibly beautiful.
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