Repeat Cycle

            First off, some good news.  Christina had her fourth dose of chemo last week.  Beforehand, she had a meeting and an ultrasound with her doctor, where they ascertained that the tumor had already shrunk by half after the first three sessions.  Loosely translated, the doctor declared that was “the bomb.”

            Also, they rejigged Christina’s therapy schedule for next week so she can participate in our Halloween haunted house, but will be busy getting chemo while we’re cleaning up the day after.  Well played, wifey.

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            And now for Mopey Writer Time.

            What gets me is how it all keeps repeating on some level, all coming together.  Which is not to say that I don’t think things will turn out better this time, but it feels like we keep playing the same notes, which stirs up so many memories of Colin and unleashes so many fears about what happens if we end up going down the same route, no matter how hard I tell myself we’re not going to do that.

            Christina pointed out when I returned to blogging that it might not be appropriate to use this site, since it was obviously focused on our lives since Colin’s death.  I can only say to that that our fight right now is to maintain the normal we have in the wake of Colin’s death the best we can.  To me, that makes sense to keep it all here (aside from my lack of necessary skills to set up a new website).  Where else do I put the moments like Facebook sending me a picture of Colin I posted in 2018 and asks me if I can tell them what’s the rest of the story now, five years later?

            I look back at Colin’s case and wonder.  I knew then what cancer can do, I thought.  Now I Know what cancer can do.  And yet I know the cases are different.  And it gets all twisted up.

             As I write this paragraph, I’m downstairs.  Everyone else is upstairs.  They just buzzed off the rest of Christina’s hair and, from all accounts, had a pretty good time up there.  There was even briefly a mohawk.  And I think it’s good they’re having fun with it.  And it’s not as if I sat down here in terror and horror.  I just couldn’t quite bring myself to be part of that merriment.  I couldn’t even tell you why.  Just, the loss of the hair makes it seem so much realer that we are fighting cancer here.  I remember when Colin’s hair began to fall out.  And, even though I had known it would happen, I remember having to take a moment or two to say “Yes, this is what we’re doing now.”

            We never could bring ourselves to shave Colin’s hair, but that left him with clumps of hair that, frankly, looked terrible.  Christina made the right choice with the shaving.  But still: Now there’s no denying to the world that this is what we’re doing.

            Not that we were denying.  But I sometimes want the option to deny.  To just say “No, this isn’t what we’re doing.  It’s another bad dream.”

            A few nights ago I dreamt about Colin for the first time in ages.  There was no sense to it.  We were at some kind of party and trying to get him to take a nap in the middle of the festivities, so demerits to us on the parenting front for that choice.  Then, today, I watched the Henry Cavill Superman movie with the kids.  Towards the end, there was a flashback of Superman as a child, running around his family farm with a cape.  I remembered how much Colin liked to dress up like Superman.  And then I remembered the situation we’re in, which doesn’t seem all that bad this time around.

            Except we’ve barely started the chemo and the really nasty stuff is going to start up in January and, what the hell do I know?  I feel Christina is going to survive this, but I also think she’s going to have to at least tour the outskirts of hell to get there.  I think I have the strength to help her.  And I’m going to help her.  I’m just so bitter with the world for asking me to do it again.  Not with Christina, the world.  Like, a friend asked me recently about belief in God, and all I could say was that I still believe, I’m just not terribly happy with how the show is being run.

            We went to church last weekend for the first time in ages, mostly because Emma is starting to take confirmation class.  I feel I have been in the church in recent years, but my last memory there is from the post-funeral service for Colin.  And my main memory from that is some guy walking up to my brother-in-law and telling him how sad he was for his son’s death, only for Tobias to awkwardly point me out as the guy who had lost a kid.

            I couldn’t remember any of the words to the service.  Not that I ever knew them in German.  But I could usually mouth along in English while the German-language service went on.  It’s all gone.  I don’t know what that means.  But it was a hard service.  One of the readings was about the rich man who throws a party and invites people in off the streets when his friends can’t make it. Yet not all of those second round of invitees got into the party, because they weren’t dressed right either.  And all I could think of was how much it would suck to almost make it into the party and then got thrown out because you weren’t dressed right for a party you hadn’t known was happening until about half an hour beforehand.

            We didn’t know any of this was coming.  I question often if we’re dressed right.  To this day, I only know the barest details about Colin’s tumor, because I figured knowing the medical minutiae was not going to be of any use to anyone and would probably terrify me.  Same thing is happening now.  People ask me about the details of Christina’s protocols and I haven’t the foggiest.  It’s not as if I could present a cogent argument to the doctor about why X would be better than Y.  But, really, it’s about protecting myself.  And Christina.  And my famiy.  Which is territory I know all too well.  Because it all keeps repeating.