May is Brain Cancer Awareness month. Other years I’ve posted statistics about Glioblastoma…how aggressive it is…how little hope there is…how much treatment sucks…how advances in the treatment are basically nonexistent for the last 30 years or so…yada yada. This year I just didn’t. Maybe I feel like nothing I do or say will help. I don’t know.
May is also the month when Jason was diagnosed and had his first brain surgery…6 years ago now…6!!!!??? Diagnosed on May 4th…had his first surgery on May 12th. Last week I went down a bit of a rabbit hole…reading Caring Bridge posts from those first weeks. A lot of that time feels surreal now…especially with the added stress of the Covid pandemic happening at the same time. I will never forget how it felt when I had to drop Jason off at the door of the hospital for his first surgery. My husband with a tumor in his head who was pretty easily confused at that point…drop him off at the door and just hope he makes it to the right place…and that I see him again.
Working in the yard this time of year always brings me back to that time. My first really big clue that something was “wrong” with Jason was when we were trying to figure out how much mulch we needed for an area of the yard. He kept getting confused and reworking the math…very unlike him. I still have the post-it with all his scribbles and computations. Levi and I are talking about mulching again this weekend…
Levi is home for the summer. Finished his first year of college already…has a whole plan that will eventually result in a PhD in Physical Therapy Rehabilitation. I’ve been thinking a lot about how Jason never got to know his kids at the ages they are now…adults! Anna was just about to start her second year of college when Jason died…Seth had just graduated high school…Levi was still in middle school. What would he think of the young adults that they have become?
With Mother’s Day this past weekend I’ve been thinking a lot about how keeping sight and focus on the kind of Mom I want to be for my kids has really been the primary thing keeping me going for the past years. Going from “parenting in partnership” to “parenting solo amongst a whole hell of a lot of grief and emotion” still takes a lot of my focus. I don’t want my kids to sit on a therapist’s couch someday talking about the trauma of having their Dad pass away and then having a Mom who was absent. Nope. My kids will always have me…my love…my support…and constant reminders of their Dad.
So I did the logical thing that people (maybe just me) do when they’re going through something…got a new tattoo. Actually, I saw a meme the other day that was along the lines of “Life in my 40’s hard. I deserve stickers too” in relationship to tattoos and I agree with that….as I just finished one and am already thinking about what’s next. This tattoo has been in my thoughts for a long time and the artist that I went to (Ellie at Northern Belle in St. Paul) nailed it perfectly. The fox and flowers wrap around my whole forearm. Foxes have become a thing for me in the past five years. The morning that Jason died I looked out into the backyard and there was a fox trotting through the yard. Now I collect them whenever I see them (notice the overalls)…and have a permanent one on my arm.
Love, Tennis, and Cancer 