Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone

Grandchildren

(1997 to 2002)

From late August 1997 through the middle of August 2002 my sister's children were our family's salvation. First the girl, six months old, all smiles, laughs (and dirty diapers) in the room where my mother recovered from that first surgery. We were all figuring out how to handle this (the situation, the operation, the prognosis, the rest of our lives) together, in real time which we found to be increasingly unreal. All the tension, distress and a sudden unfamiliarity with ourselves would have been unmanageable without a distraction. Thankfully, we had an adorable, utterly uncomplicated distraction, a gift that gave us all something to savor at a time when we may have otherwise had to fill every second with actions, words and especially thoughts.

Then came the boy, a little blonde baby born in the last week of May, easing us into the sweltering summer of 2000. A couple of weeks before the full schedule of concentrated chemotherapy commenced. How could we have made it through June and July (the heat, the hair loss, the sight of incorruptible staff pumping poison into my mother in order to make her better) without this ebullient newborn and his dedicated (and only slightly jealous) big sister? The pictures from that period are awkward metaphors: the pale and chemical-bloated grandmother holding two beacons of immortality in her lap, their existence injecting a purpose and animation the rest of us could not begin to approximate.

Every single day between March '97 and the first week of August '02, those two kids were the things my mother loved best in the world: more than any hobbies, more than memories, more than us, more than herself. We saw this; we understood it and we accepted it. During the more difficult times we embraced it, appreciating the forces of the universe for providing a source of vitality that money and medicine do not address.