Cloudy Weather 1 & 2

In 2018, I began processing my own emotions and how life was going through the metaphor of weather patterns: Cloud Weather, Mainly Cloudy, Dark Weather, Sunny Breaks.

Though I did not date these two writings below, by their content and context I can tell I wrote the first entry just before Kim's first chemo treatment of 2018 (which I wrote about in the previous post), and the second I wrote very soon after her treatment, in early July 2018. 
Both of them speak to the intense sense of loss, foreboding and grief we were feeling after receiving Kim's second diagnosis, and the reality of another six months of chemo ahead.



Cloudy Weather 1  (June 2018, post-diagnosis, pre chemo 1)
There is a great darkness, a heavier cloud hanging over our home this time around (2018).  Maybe it is because we know what is ahead; what chemo is like, what a Port-O-Cath is and feels like. We already know what the inside of the chemo room looks and smells like and what the other faces there all look like. Kim knows what the chemo feels like inside of her, what the side effects are, what it feels like to lay down and watch useless movies and TV shows for days on end. What it feels like to feel awful. There seems a be a dark cloud hanging over our home.
 
Much of the joy seems to be sucked out.  I have always prided myself on being a joyful person; not happy, but joyful. That even in the place of uncertainty, suffering and challenge, there was always a lightness of heart within me, a joy within me.  That seems to have received a near fatal blow.  The tears come quicker and depression feels like it sits just under the surface.  We seem to be walking around the house and eating our meals with a third person. Its name is not cancer, it is not death, but it is loss. 
 
Loss of something deep. Loss of optimism, loss of joy, loss of lightness. Loss seems to stock our sitting, eat, sleeping, walking, brushing of teeth and going to work.  And I fear this new housemate will only get bigger as we seem to become smaller and smaller. As it becomes more, as it swallows up more and more of our life, we become smaller and weaker.
 
Our will to fight also seems to have vacated the premise. We have not given up, but the strength to fight just isn’t there. We eat things we shouldn’t be eating, we drink things we shouldn’t be drinking.  We are both tired of fighting already, of putting on a brave face, of sitting up straight and trying to work up the courage and strength to make the right decisions and do the right things. We just want to live a normal life experience, but that does not seem to be in the cards. So maybe, for two kids who never went through a rebellion stage in their teens, maybe this is our rebellious stage, rebelling through candy and chips and more sugar than we maybe should. Things we know aren’t healing in the fight against cancer. Rebelling against the life and loss that cancer has already inflicted upon us, and just saying, “F*ck it!”   
 
 
Cloudy Weather 2  (Early July 2018, after Kim's first chemo treatment)
How do you hold your wife in bed when she is crying and asking why God is silent, why will he not answer us?  How do you hold your wife when she is crying and muttering through the tears, choking out that she does not want to die?  How do you comfort someone when there are no words, nor any formation of words in the English language that could ever take away an ounce of the pain and foreboding she is feeling?  How do you comfort the person you love most in the world when every sound and groan and tear that wells up in their eyes only crushes your spirit more and more as you watch them suffer as they do?
 
How do you know when it’s the appropriate time to get up after you have both been crying and holding each?  How do you leave the house and go to work when your spirit is crushed, your wife is sick, and you feel so empty you just want to sit on the curb and disappear?  How do you carry the burden of comfort and support when you can’t carry any more of anything, but you know you have to because as a spouse you made vows, and you know you are the last line of defence. That you have no choice but to put that next foot in the front of the other, even though every part of you is pleading to just collapse and weep and be done with it all.
 
What do you do when you know that there is no one who understands you, when no one can grasp what you are truly feeling and wanting to say because you don’t even know yourself what you are feeling and wanting to say. How deep can loneliness go when you feel alien to your own very self?  How does life go on this way?