chapter 4: part 4

continued from chapter 4: part 3
We weren’t working out our new life-style in a vacuum. We worked it around the need to carry on daily work schedules, domestic tasks and the round of visitors we suddenly began having. The stream was fairly constant. Cherished sons and daughters-in law and grandchildren came from across the country. We loved seeing them but we missed and needed the quiet we had gotten used to. It’s hard to question the meaning of life when a soggy little kid crawls into bed with you demanding a story about Mister Wiggles, whoever that is.

When we were along together we kept up the comfortable old habits. We set aside time on Saturday mornings to buy grocery items at the Farmers Market and to buy the small household things jotted down on the master list during the week. We’d drop into the local auction rooms to place a reserve bid on something of interest. I mention these simple things because now they are my fond memories of a time when life was “normal.”

A new life plan was taking shape just the same. Our focus was firmly fixed on Hal’s health and the invisible cancer. We had joined a new, dynamic evening self help group with trained leaders, again through the Cancer society. The format of this one allowed people a chance to talk about their illnesses and fears and what they needed and wanted. To my relief there was a group devoted entirely to care givers and about this point because of the strain, you would have been hard-pressed to identify the caregiver from the cancer patient.

We watched helplessly while a young man and his wife anguished over the need for a bone marrow transplant for him and the fact that his chances of getting one in time to help were negligible and a divorced woman who had never been able to bring herself to tell her teen-age son that her two hospital stays were for mastectomies.

We loved one another, enjoyed our friends and our work and gave ourselves quiet time to think and contemplate. We slowly discarded any thoughts, acquaintances and actions that no longer suited our present thinking. We wanted to talk about living and loving and we naturally gravitated to frank, open people who could handle talk of life and death without problems. We shared this illness with the children and we stayed close to one another.

At the end of summer, Hal was finally ready to put the house on the market. We had to cope with strangers tramping through and weekend open houses and remembering to heat the pot pourri to mask the smell of cauliflower. It got to be a habit to whisk a cloth around the bathroom basins repeatedly and make sure the toilet lids were down, that all dirty dishes were hidden away in the dishwasher the instant a meal was finished and I found that the unwashed pots could be tucked away under the snow on the back porch in the case of a last-minute viewing.

continued in chapter 4: part 5