Over the last few weeks, Ive spoken with a bunch of families that - TopicsExpress

Over the last few weeks, Ive spoken with a bunch of families that are going through challenges in treatment...and by challenges I mean treatment is shitty, and it is a damn rough road to travel, Steve and Pattie Vezina, Kyle Nielson and Dorien Nielson, Marshall Jensen and Amanda Joyce Hunt Jensen, and Robert-Dana Campbell and Jessica Helmer Parkinson to name a few, so I wanted to send out this little piece of writing that I wrote that talks a little bit about one aspect of being in a relationship while having cancer. Note: For anyone reading anything into this: This is just about me writing about going through it. I dont mean a thing about anyone elses relationships. Unless its good, then its definitely about all of ours. :) It’s called “Till Death... Till death... What are we supposed to do with our anger? Do we turn it outward to a universe that doesnt listen, doesn’t care? Do we turn it inward toward deaf cells that grow unchecked? She cannot understand She may love deeply and thoroughly, but she does not know what it is I go through. And yet it is the same for me: I do not, I cannot know, what it is to be in her shoes. This is a special hell reserved for those that travel paths such as these. ...but I want. I want to convey my fear, my anger, my desperation. But words cannot do them justice. They leap forth from my mouth, but fall short. They words cannot carry themselves across the gulf between us, and so we suffer, we face our fears, we walk the path, together and alone. I see the end approach, ever faster, a ravenous locomotive that eats away at my future as it plunges onward toward me. She sees the wide, lonely expanse of a future, bereft of all those things we planned, those things I promised. To be there. To help. To have and to hold. But even in the anger, in the confusion, in the miscommunication, in the quiet frustration and sullen silences, in the pain shared and separate, there is love. It beats there and bridges the gaps, it whispers that though she does not understand, though I do not, that we try to, desperately. That we both long for the the key, for the balm, for that magical medicine that would mend all wounds and calm all worries, that would banish the demons that plague us and restore the sense of certainty that was stolen so many years ago. That each of us would give anything if we could soothe the other. And so, haltingly, we talk. We acknowledge the other, we show that we care. We touch, we cry, and we find our way forward, each holding some of the unbearable burden, our loads somehow lighter, and by some alchemy, we transform the anger into stubbornness, into some mangled, beautiful form of hope, and we look at the path in front of us… ...and we hold hands, and we bite back tears, and reign in fear, and we take step forward, and we take another, and another (the only way we know how). -Dov Siporin for all the fights we have, and the stubborn love that lives within them.