A Different Way of Life
My sister, Christy, and her family arrived Sunday afternoon a few hours after Jonathan and Heather left. Steve spent a few hours with us that afternoon and we all went to the local Mexican restaurant for dinner before he turned around and headed back home. Christy and the boys stayed until Wednesday.
I loved having her there for a few days. We went walking that first afternoon. I usually spill words like hot lava, but somehow it’s gotten really hard to talk. The words bury themselves deep inside. There are too many of them and they’re all disorganized. Sometimes they don’t match what I feel in the moment and other times they’re too much for the person who is with me. And sometimes they simply hide, as though my body is trying to shield itself from the sorrow as though it didn’t exist. But when I walk, the words come tumbling out.
On Monday we switched the boys’ room and office so that Liam wouldn’t have to do the stairs anymore. Christy helped me choose curtains and blinds for the bare windows and found a small bookshelf and baskets for clothes at Target on her way back to Mom’s house. Liam and Adam both LOVED their new room! Adam was convinced he never wanted to move back upstairs. Liam wants his old room back when he can walk again. They moved from the brightest room in the house to the darkest. It’s great for sleeping!
Tuesday Mom and Beth came and the men joined us for supper. Everyone says it, but your priorities really do shift when you get a life-threatening diagnosis. There are a lot of things that become inconsequential people skyrocket to the top of the list.
The boys did so well at spending time with Liam. Normally they would all have been outside in ferocious tackle football games, but this time they played Bounce Off at the kitchen table. Stopping their activity didn’t stop their laughter! For most of the boys, this was only a brief interlude of solidarity. I could barely handle the pain in my chest thinking about how this could be forever for Liam.
The final results from the biopsy are in. There were no surprises diagnostically. It really is osteosarcoma. In the afternoon as Mom, Beth, and Christy were in the house working on things, I was outside on the phone with someone who was trying to be helpful. She gave me so much helpful information, but it also felt as though she hadn’t processed her own grief well and she gave me rich details of every single thing that had gone wrong and the many, many complications before her warrior died. It gave me a lot of information, but it was a hard, hard conversation and so much overload. During the conversation a butterfly landed on my leg. One of the kids ran past and scared him off, but he came right back. Four times he was frightened off by someone and only to come back to rest somewhere on my body. He was just a butterfly, but he felt like a messenger from heaven.