I still get a bit "seepy" from time to time concerning Cancer and more especially about losing my brother. Just got home from the Girl's Get Together/ Quilting retreat.  To catch you up, one of my high school friends hosts a girls only party up in North Texas behind the piney curtain. Besides sitting in a huge room sewing together, there's a fair amount of chatting, most of it surprisingly deep.  The topic of cancer came up, probably does anytime twelve women sit down to visit. The girl next to me (who I really feel connection with - weird for me as I generally keep a polite distance with people who are new to me) was working on the same quilt she was last year when I first met her.  The quilt fabric was harvested from a man's oxford cloth shirts and is becoming quilt squares which will eventually become quilts for that man's two adult daughters and his wife.  This friend is currently heart deep in the declining mental health of her own father in law. I could feel her heart breaking as she told the story. The family is in denial as the man exhibits life long social skills which have ingrained themselves in to habits while at the same time being obviously as lost as a stray kitten. Sometimes he seems like himself. That's who the family needs to see. Its a private and complicated story but each one of us will live out a variation of it as we tend to our elderly. I shame myself for the relief I feel knowing that my momma is safe with Jesus and I don't have to shape my life around hers. I feel bad about not being able to "like" her better. My friends remember her kindly.

One friend, who does the machine quilting for people, brought her huge tub of scraps to share with me. I'll put some pictures up to show you how she has taught me to make quilt blocks for a secret project that I'm involved with. Sounds mysterious doesn't it? I came home with a YETI 45 crammed with colorful cotton fabrics. I'm ironing them this week while I wait for my sewing machine to come home from the shop. Something inside it is saying no when I press the yes button.

Cancer. They wanted to know what I thought about the different choices people consider when they find out they have cancer. Starting with Stage four any cancer - I personally would chose to go directly to palliative care. I would chose for the people who love me to never see the pain and in my mind, inevitable despair, on my face ... contorting and destroying my body. The therapies we have for treating stage four cancers take you down a very dark road which leads to a tunnel with no light at the end of it. Those therapies are for people who need to buy time. My brother needed time. The very worst pain in my life was in seeing him see the pain I was experiencing as I looked at him with my guard down. I thought he was sound asleep ... curled up and whimpering faintly ... on that third day after an infusion. I wonder that it didn't break him before it killed him. Added to his burden was my anguish. A tear slid down his face sideways as we silently accepted the fact that he could not survive this. It's a hard thing to watch hope shatter. Fortunately the time he bought brought him some peace.
Momma was not a candidate for chemo or for any of the therapies. Because of her heart condition, or her age, or the quality of her insurance I did not ask. The Oncologist told me that I could have Momma's cancer biopsied so that I might know it's primary source ... they told me it was in her liver and the size of a grapefruit ... and that Momma would very likely not survive the procedure. I didn't ask any other questionsI told Momma when she asked, that her cancer was too far along for the chemo to help, which she meekly accepted every time the dementia prompted her to ask again. They "gave" Momma three months max but she was gone six weeks later ... and was pain free the entire time. I believe she decided to "go easy".

There's one other thing about her passing that you might find interesting. I had decided not to share it with y'all because I may have misunderstood it or imagined it. Right before she died she looked deep into my eyes. To me it felt like the first time she had truly ever looked at me. The me of me. It creeped me out but I don't understand why. I am generally willing to let people see me if they are inclined to really look. Anyway she "saw" me and in her eyes I instantly read "regret", "remorse". I told her I love you Momma, I always have ... . She seemed to panic for a split second, maybe it was that she caught her last breathe, then she died. To me it felt exactly like a birth. I think she was born in to the soul that God was thinking of when he formed her in the womb. I think He is still forming us as we develop to be born in to eternity.

I told my friends that I think the insurance companies should offer a choice between whatever the protocol for their cancer is and palliative care plus a lump sum of money so that the cancer patient could spend that insurance money in whatever way was most meaningful to them. I don't know how it is decided who gets what level of care, but I imagine it is quite expensive.