Remembering joy

I'm doing okay. I'm functioning pretty well, meeting deadlines, feeding myself well, taking care of the cats and the garden. Several times each day, tears come suddenly; sometimes they stick around for a while. I laugh, too, though, and smile. Occasionally, I even spontaneously say, "I have a great life."

But I have a constant heaviness, a weariness that comes from more than sleep deficiencies. There's a wrong that I am powerless to right; I feel defeated and punished. And I'm still, subconsciously, trying to keep Sandy alive. Multiple times in the last week, I've felt my brain crack as the reality of her absence hits me again. Here/ not here. How is that possible?

I love this photo. I think I was aiming for Sandy,
but Roo stuck her head in the camera's path.

Conscious this afternoon of the weight, I was trying to remember the last time I felt no despair or fear. It was late last April, an evening that Sandy and I biked down the road to our neighborhood Thai restaurant. We'd enjoyed our meal and our conversation, and we were laughing about the rain, which was just beginning. As we unlocked our bikes, Sandy said, "Oh, I forgot to tell you. Dr. Reddy emailed me that my MRI was clean."

Clean in a scan means no tumors, no cancer. The MRI was of Sandy's brain, which was the area I was most concerned about. I was ecstatic. "Clean?" I asked her. "Yeah," she said, "Isn't that great?" We laughed and talked about it on the short ride home. I remember the feeling in my chest — a weightlessness, an absence of fear, replaced by joy and gratitude. I told her again how much I loved her brain, and how it should make pretty pictures.

Somewhere along the way home, Sandy admitted she wasn't sure Dr. Reddy had used the word clean. The weight started to return. We looked at the email when we got home. The word she used was stable. Good news, but not the exciting development I thought it was.

And a few weeks later, we learned that stable wasn't even accurate, as the scan showed a new lesion that had been noted further down in the report; Dr. Reddy hadn't seen it when she sent the initial email. As I feared, it was Sandy's brain that was most at risk; the cancer spread there rapidly and through her central nervous system. There would be no more moments of true relief for me. But even though that brief respite turned out to be a false relief, I remember that 15-minute misunderstanding fondly. Sometimes, when I'm in a relatively good space, I can remember that feeling and I can almost imagine having it again.