5:05pm June 19, 2014

So…

My father’s numbers that might indicate pancreatic cancer are completely wonky. But we still don’t know what he has, and apparently we may never know what he has, and all the labs and stuff aren’t back yet.

They’re preparing to give him chemo and send him home on hospice.

But this line from my mom’s email made me cry:

“At this hospital they play Braham’s lullaby each time a baby is born in the nursery.

Ron keeps saying there will be a lot of "little troopers” to replace him when he is gone and smiles.“

I am so glad, though, that he thinks of it that way.

Especially given the unlikelihood of his ever having any more direct descendants. Shane doesn’t want kids. I likely can’t have kids, my periods stopped when I was 28 and I’ve also been told having a child could kill me. And Jeremy is highly unlikely to have kids.

And yet it still feels like in other ways, our family will go on forever. Because we’re connected to the world. And putting your genes out there is not the only way to be connected to the world.

Of the kids in our family…

Each one of us has undoubtedly saved lives, both directly and indirectly.

Each one of us has changed the lives of people we have connected with.

Each one of us has connections to places, and places matter as much as people. Like my connection to the redwoods where I was born – that’s a deep, sacred, and demanding connection that will never go away, that will last beyond my personal death, that will tie me to that place for as long as the place exists and longer. I know that each of us has a place like that, even if I haven’t talked to my brothers about the places that are special to them.

Nothing that exists can ever not have existed.

And life will go on being life for as long as it can. And our connection to life goes well beyond our personal genetic connection to family.

I know that my brothers and I have all done a lot of things to help other people. And any time you help someone, you’re creating a connection, even if you never see them again. We’ve also been helped greatly by other people, which creates the same connection.

We all make contributions to the world, and those contributions matter and will outlast us, the same way having children would outlast us.

I can’t even imagine, I don’t think, the degree to which my writing has affected other people. When I try, I just can’t. I get so much amazing feedback from people I’ve never met in my life and will probably never get a chance to really talk to, who show me that I’ve accomplished my goal – to do for other people, in writing, what other people’s writing has done for me. And that’s the lasting contribution I hope to make to the world. I am not going to have children, but I do have this, and it means everything to me.

And it’s not just the big things like that.

When I think of people who have helped me in huge ways, they may not even know who they are or that what they have done is so huge in my life. For instance, lichgem has been so consistently and quietly supportive, even while going through serious stuff of her own, that it makes me cry to think how nice she has been to me. We don’t know each other except for on tumblr, but we’ve clearly grown to care deeply about what happens to each other.

And that may be the most important thing of all, that people can do for each other.

To quietly support each other in difficult times and in easier ones. Even, when it’s impossible to reach out in a way the other person can see, just to think of each other, helps, because it’s the love that matters, the intent that matters, not just the expression. I know there are people who have been supporting me through my father’s illness, and I will never know because they are never able to send and ask or click ‘like’, but that doesn’t mean they’re doing nothing. When it comes to love, when it comes to the ultimate kind of love, the kind that changes things for everyone, intent means more than anything.

And this kind of love is what connects us to each other. More than genes, more than family, more than anything, it’s love. Love is what allows life to continue. Love is the most powerful force in the universe.

And sometimes you can show that love just by clicking 'like’ when someone is having a hard time. And sometimes you can’t even do that. But that still matters. What you do is not meaningless. What you do is not little. Any time you love, it changes things.

When i think of my father thinking of those babies replacing him, it makes me cry, but it makes me hopeful. It makes me hopeful that he is really understanding that the way the world goes on… it’s not about whether those babies are his grandkids (by this age he could even have had great-grandkids if we were willing and able, he’s almost 73), it’s about whether the babies are being born at all. It’s about the connections formed by love, not the connections formed by genetics.

And I know that each of his children has gone out and formed loving connections with other people. And that each of his children has formed loving connections with animals, and places, and things that aren’t normally considered possible objects of love at all. And that each of his children has done things that will leave a positive mark on the world in different ways. And that this love is what carries on the family name, so to speak, not whether we’re going to have children.

Hopefully my mom will let him see this post. I know she reads my tumblr. I hope he understands. I hope he understands how far love goes, how far love matters. I’m sure he will. I’ve told him all along, love is the only way through this, surrendering to love, to the deepest love in the world. And that’s not just true for him, it’s true for all of us who are surviving him.

I’m finding this incredibly difficult, because it seems like one way grief works is to grab your ego and yank it in every possible negative direction it can go. I had no idea that I was capable of the rage I get sometimes. And it’s not productive rage, it’s the kind of rage that could really do damage if I unleashed it at the wrong person. And I get horrible urges to do just that. I see everyone in my family struggling with the way grief wreaks havoc on your ego and sometimes makes your worst sides come out. And love is, again, the only way through. It’s the only way to keep from shattering to pieces, or from shattering those around you to pieces. Love is everything. Things like dying, or facing a death in the family, just make that much more obvious than it is most of the time. Because they force you to either be in total agony (and possibly cause agony to others), or surrender yourself to love and go wherever love tells you to go.

I’m finding the more days go by since I found out my father was dying, the easier it is to accept that, one day, he won’t be here. The first day, it was unbearable, I felt like an exposed nerve, I felt like nothing would ever be okay again. I felt like it could only get worse, and worse, and worse, and that I would drown in it. But today… I can’t say that I like this, I will never be able to say anything like that, and if you read that into this then you’re reading it wrong. But today I can accept that he will always be here, because he will always have been here, because time doesn’t work the way people think it does. Anything that ever existed, always has existed. But more importantly, he knows enough about love, and that gives me so much hope, I can tell that he’s taken our advice about love to heart, and I can tell that this will make it so much less awful than it would be otherwise. It’s going to be awful, and you can’t change that, but with sufficient love, it can be as good as death can be. And that’s all we can ask for.

I sent my parents a copy of Kathy Mattea’s CD, "Calling Me Home”, it should be coming from Amazon to their post office box sometime soon. Especially for the song “Gone, Gonna Rise Again”, but also the rest of them – many of the songs deal with loss in a way that is beautiful, and the album has been really helping me. We’ve been Kathy Mattea fans since I was a kid, but she’s really matured and come into her own, and gone back to her roots with this album.

Some of the lyrics that keep coming to mind during all of this:

These apple trees on the mountain side

Gone, gonna rise again

He planted the seeds just before he died

Gone, gonna rise again

I guess he knew he’d never see

Red fruit hangin’ from the tree

But he planted the seeds for his children and me

Gone, gonna rise again

And also…

It’s high on the ridge above the farm

Gone, gonna rise again

I think of my people who have gone on

Gone, gonna rise again

Like a tree that grows in the mountain ground

Storms of life have cut 'em down

But the new wood springs from the roots in the ground

Gone, gonna rise again

I like the way it makes the connection between people and the land. Because for me, everything I am is connected to some very specific land, and everything that happens in that land is a part of me. And I know that my father feels similarly, about different land. And the continuation of those parts of the land is a continuation of each other, and not just as a metaphor.

My favorite dream about dying was one where I was taken back to the land I was born on, and allowed to die on the forest floor there. My father is going on hospice soon, so he’ll be moving home. I wonder if he’ll have the chance to die outdoors if he wants, if they can roll his bed out there, if such things can even be planned to that degree. I hope he considers it as a possibility, because he lives in a beautiful forest. It may not happen, because you can never plan exactly when you’re going to die, or predict it. But to die outside in the land he loves might mean as much to him as it would to me in the same circumstances.

I keep thinking about the cycle of life, how death is what allows life to continue, how love is what ties it all together. And this isn’t frivolous fluffy stuff. This is what you get when you look as deep as you can into how the world works, how life works, how things are tied together.

And I love my father more than anything. And I know that any time I see a pine tree in the mountains, that’s a part of him. Forever. That doesn’t change. Things are connected in ways you can’t see with your eyes, but they’re still connected. And he is connected with mountains and pine trees and granite, and radios and circuit boards, and all kinds of things. And those things will always be a part of him, and he will always be a part of them.

They’re talking about whether to do chemo. And how much chemo to do. And how to do palliative care in a way that will keep him lucid but as free of pain as they can manage. And I just hope he manages to die the least awful death he can. And that Love will be there the whole time, guiding us all through, because gods know we need it.

And mom, if you get this post, can you show it to him or read it to him or something? It would mean a lot to me.