As a child, my mom once tripped while running inside and slammed her face into the corner of a glass coffee table, splitting the lip entirely. In the emergency room later, she mumbled out to my grandmother “this is worse than being lost.”
“Being lost?” Gramma said, “you’ve never been lost.”
“Yeah, but if I had been lost, this’d be worse,” my mom said, thus cementing a story that’s still told to this day.
She died of brain cancer a little over a decade ago, now. Three year battle with a monster that would always win — we know that, now, having looked that kind of cancer up, though at the time she’d insisted she’d “beat it.”
I have often thought of that little girl, that young mother, that chemo-puffy brain-addled dying woman and thought it: “Was this just always what was going to happen?”
What about my dad? A decade after her, early onset dementia, and when I was eight and he was reading softly to me, was this always what was going to happen?
What about me?
I don’t have an answer to the question. I don’t have words of comfort, and I have nothing sweet or bitter to offer. I can only share, now, that I have wondered.
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