Mucositis

Two years ago

Another first: on July 21, 2015, David doesn’t walk into Cox Clinic; I park at the Fruit St. Garage and wheel him in on a borrowed wheelchair. (Thank you, Deb Butler!) He doesn’t bring his laptop, just the most recent issue of The Economist. He hasn’t eaten in several days (a ‘last time’ we didn’t notice: his last meal), just sips of warm milk and honey water. All day long he coughs about every 10 minutes and his throat pain is 8 out of 10. Dr. Fathi thinks the leukemia is causing the painful inflammation.

Second Half of July 2017

I spent some time with my old blogs this week, preparing this post. Two years ago, David had less than 3 weeks to live. We lived day-to-day, not knowing when he would die, how he would die, where he would die. Dr. Fathi warned me that final-stage leukemia could cause a patient to bleed to death. Would that happen as I drove him home from MGH on Storrow Drive? Would Annie make it home from Beijing before David died?

It’s painful to sort through the blog posts of the final three weeks. I weep, overcome by acute pain, trying to process those final days.

Yesterday I woke up to rain falling outside my bedroom window. Usually this is the hottest week of the summer, but the temperature was only 59 degrees. I decided to read the ‘living onward’ chapters in Melissa Dalton-Bradford’s book On Loss and Living Onward. Now that David’s death is almost two years ago, I thought I was ready to re-read her thoughts on the next phase. But as I glanced at a bookmarked page, comparing grief to the feeling of physical drowning, it all came rushing back, the wrenchingly intense sorrow. I turned to Jim and cried in his arms.

In my journal last November I asked myself, “what is the balance between acknowledging, accepting, and fully experiencing strong emotion and moving on? Is misery always self-imposed?” At this point, I’m living onward, functioning well, but right now, July 2017, the grief is close to the surface. I want to feel, want to acknowledge the loss, experience the grief, not pretend it’s not there. I've lost my son. That's not going away.