rabbit hole

I want to laugh sometimes, and sometimes I want to cry but mostly I just want to scream. Hard and loud. My mother can't tell me that she's hungry anymore. She can't frame the words. She gets lost between the bathroom and the front door and I find her on the deck gazing at not much at all. This is my mother, she of the lists and details and notebooks. My mother, the reminder of my birthday and all the days in between.

How can this happen in both their heads? That we lose them before they die? I can't think about it too much or I will fall down the rabbit hole. And I am not sure where I will land.

My mother wants us to go away together. All fifteen of us. It has to be soon, very soon. So we go away next weekend. You know when you get married you go on a honeymoon and then you have a baby and before you pop you have a baby-moon? So what is this? A death-moon? A goodbye-moon? It's a "why is this happening"-moon for me.

The oncologist told my sister and I that it's unheard of to have two parents so ill, so close to one another and with such abnormal disease journeys. I feel like we won some kind of award. The award that you really don't want.

So hello. My name is daughter number one from family abnormal. How do you do.

As I found with my Dad the flip side of all this grief is joy. And like a ray of sun shining through the canopy of a darkened forest, joy at this time is so bright.  And this little man in his birthday transformer costume brought such joy. We laughed until our sides ached at all the transformer moves. He seemed to know that we needed to laugh and "performed" for ages, eventually collapsing in a heap laughing. Joy so sweet x