The same floor. The same chair. Shift change.

I know the rhythms of this ICU. Twenty minutes until the nurses will let me in. Twenty minutes. Until.

It’s just a building. Just a building, a floor, a unit where my mother drew her last labored breath.

This time, I am here with joy in my heart.

My sister’s tumor is gone. History. Dead tissue in a lab somewhere, long gone from her body. Divorced from her brain.

She’s talking. Asking for the dog that’s brought new life to our home since the two of them arrived Saturday night. Moving her arms, legs, fingers, toes.

Healing.

Rumor has it her neurosurgeon is going to write a case study about her. Because my sisters and I, we are strong like you read about in medical journals.

And it ain’t rocket science. But it sure was brain surgery.

The answer was almost always the same: lasagna. Angel food cake with fudge icing.

Except for those dark, early years when I seemed to favor layer cake with lemon (ewww!) filling and buttercream frosting.

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I’m so tired. My back is aching, my eyes are closing. I was scrubbing pots and pans, cutting up the chicken in the slow cooker. A long, teary, lingering hug goodnight to my boys, kisses on their sweet cheeks. Goodnight sweet angels. Look, I know Daylight Savings just started yesterday. I know you are wide awake. I, however, am not. I need you to go to sleep, boys. No shenanigans. Sleep. I love you. No, I love you more. Now go to sleep.

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My sister had a seizure yesterday. She is now out of the hospital, and having recently become a connoisseur of these local establishments I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Norwalk sucks monkey chimpanzee eggs when it comes to both quality of care and patient services. Having spent most of the past 24 hours there, I feel eminently qualified to give them a good old fashioned Bronx cheer.

More importantly: the seizure isn’t necessarily a sign that things are worse. In fact, she just had a scan early last week that showed no changes with the tumors.

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I think this was 1977, maybe 1978. Which would make it impossible for the child on the left to be my son, because he was born in 2000.

Besides the color of my hair, let’s dwell on the texture for a moment. I think the word that best describes it is STRAW. We went to Hawaii at the tail end of summer, following months of swim practice every weekday from 10 – 11:30 and 3:30 – 4:30 (on Saturdays we did the morning workout only). The hours between workouts were often spent exclusively in the pool, and sometimes my dad and I would go back to the club at night to cool down for a few minutes. These were the days before I knew to put loads of conditioner on my hair and then wear a cap. And yeah, this was also before my hair curled… like my mom’s.

The memorial service was beautiful yesterday. The four ginormous collages were a hit

And so was the eulogy. I made my mom proud, and I felt her standing right there with me at the lectern in the church.

As I said to my husband yesterday, if I could write and then deliver my mother’s eulogy in front of a church packed to Easter Sunday capacity, I can do anything.

Whirs and tubes and beeping machines she hated. IV drips.

This is not how I want to remember my mother. Let’s go back…

The ER. Call the priest. Get him here. It’s time for him to pray. It’s time for me to pray.

No. Go back.

My husband calls, telling me to come because she was having so much trouble breathing. I get to the house. Convincing her to go to the ER, I see fear in her eyes. Helping her to the car because she refused the ambulance. Mom, breathe. Slow it down mom. Breathe.

No. Go back.

A call the morning before, telling her I left dinner on the front porch while she was sleeping, and it’s chicken paprikash. Through the labored breathing, clear delight in her voice. “Oh, I love your chicken paprikash.”

It’s not even been a week since the end began. And everything is different now.

My mind is addled. I forget what I’m doing, unable to finish a thought or a task. I miss her so much.

I can’t write. I chop the ice in my driveway, looking for peace. I’ll swim this week and try to clear my mind. I don’t know when it will come. But it has to. Even now I write reluctantly. But I have to. I have to find the perfect words.

I’m eulogizing her on Saturday.

Go back.

A trip up the Merritt with precious cargo in the back seat. Lovingly, my mom and I take it out of the car and into the house. The silk is beautiful and so strong, miraculously close to intact. Yes, I can do it, the woman tells us. What color was it originally? It will be beautiful again. This time, a beautiful ivory.

The warm November sleeves become caps on my broad shoulders, a nod to the oppressive July heat. The beautiful button-back becomes a deep V. With a wider back and ribcage, I am seven inches taller than my mom.  Thanks to the acres of crinolines she wore so many years before, on my taller frame it’s long enough to graze the floorboards on the beach-side deck where I’ll marry the great love of my life.

I take out my wedding pictures the day after she died. We rejected this picture, my mother and I. We didn’t want it in the wedding album. It’s the only one of just the two of us together that day.

I’m wearing our dress. Our faces are together, tilted, a bit shiny from the oppressive heat. We’re smiling widely. I can’t remember why we didn’t like it.

It’s the most beautiful picture I’ve ever seen.

You’ve always been with me.

Spending days with me and your nephews in the post September 11 lunacy. Fixing the heat in the Scooter on the way home from visiting Matthew in Maine in 1983. Telling me I was fucking up when I needed (not wanted) to hear it. Toasting my newly minted marriage as only you could.

And, Springsteen.

I am with you today, holding your hand.

I love you Robby.

Finally. I started this blog in 2008. Finally.

And finally, 2008 is drawing to a close. Finally.

I’ve had so much fun.  So many of you have made me laugh (and occasionally tear up) over these past several months as I’ve read your blogs and as you’ve commented here. I’ve been so honored every time a reader comes back, so happy when anyone leaves a comment. Although I don’t blog every day (and there are times when I go weeks without so much as posting a picture), I’ve got this blog under my skin… if only, for no other reason, the freedom to use whatever words I damn well please without anyone having a hissy fit.

More 2008 in rewingdangdoo after the jump

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A look back to last fall, when the center could not hold.

Scandal and secrecy are like a blanket, covering me with the tales that aren’t mine, the secrets I’ll take to the grave. A career at perilous risk, the careening marriage, a story of heartbreak told deep in the woods as we sat on a footbridge and basked in the autumn sun. It’s safe with me. You can tell me anything; I won’t tell. It covers me, this blanket, keeping me warm against the chill as I seal my lips and keep your secrets close.

Until this secret – lighting the blanket on fire, charring my flesh and smothering everything inside. Incendiary harm. Parents who couldn’t and wouldn’t know until there was hope. A woman who needed her mommy and instead got her sisters, voices across the phone lines as familiar as the sound of rain on the roof. Sisters researching the words, deciphering while we learned. And keeping the secret.

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Summer 2005 should have been a flat-out great summer. We were new to the pool club that year, and spent as much time as the boys would let us floating in the water as night fell. Our oldest boy had just turned five, and we were well past the diapers, sleep deprivation and constant neediness that left us with blank pages where our memories of 2002 – 2004 were supposed to be.

My husband suffers from the occasional migraine, and I am a chronic (if periodic) insomniac who can usually beat it back with exercise. Suddenly he had two, sometimes three migraines a week. I was routinely waking up at 3 a.m., unable to even consider falling back to sleep. Neither one of us was willing to admit the problem: not to ourselves, not to each other. Our son was about to start Kindergarten, and we were ten kinds of freaked out.

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