“Heavy is the air around you”

Note: Before I begin, I want it to be known that I’ll be writing about Cancer… again. It seems to be a recurring thing and honestly, I haven’t talked about this with a lot of friends so, I’m sorry to those of you whom I’m close to. Been trying to muddle though my own thoughts and feelings with this.

The last month has felt like a blur. A blur where things began with repeating the same daily rhythms, which is to be expected. All of that fell to the wayside one day when Tyler, my husband, received a call from his Mom and they spent what felt like eternity on the phone.

“She needs to have more labs; a biopsy and a CT Scan” he said when he got off the phone. With talking more it became clear what had happened. Her Pap Smear did its job, signaling that something was going on with the cervical tissue. One abnormal pap, a colposcopy that led to a more invasive biopsy, talk of a full hysterectomy and whether ovaries would be taken or not… a lot of talk that scared her, rightfully. Tyler lost his maternal Grandma to ovarian cancer.

Another blip of worry, uncertainty as we awaited the staging from the biopsy and then good news right before the big family trip that she began planning last year and told us about at Christmas. Stage 1a-b cervical cancer. Clean margins to go in an do the hysterectomy laparoscopically.

Life is unusually cruel to those who don’t deserve it. And she is one who doesn’t deserve it. I don’t talk about my mother in law often, but she and I formed a close bond when I moved in with her after I graduated college and before Tyler and I got married. For four months we were roommates and it was really great to be able to get to know my mother in law in that way. She’s always been someone whose opinions matter to me.

At the same time that we were awaiting the staging news, one of my close friends in central Wisconsin was losing her mother in law to awful peritoneal cancer. We were both struggling in different ways and it felt like most days I was just treading water between more bad news.

While in Vermont for our family trip, on the flight out there I asked my mother in law point blank “how do you feel about this”… and it led to a lot of mixed emotions, rightfully so. Thankful that it was caught early enough that it didn’t require more treatment but also scary. The C word is always scary in any which way.

While she wanted to just get the surgery over and done with - understandable, of course - she also was thankful to have time together with family before the surgery. To be able to have my husband and our family along with my sister in law and her family all in one fairly large, albeit at times cramped, air bnb in a partially renovated family farm.

I feel that any time we have a brief run in with death, a what if, could be, etc, that we always turn to become introspective and begin to question what is important to us. It’s easy to always say “family” but how do we show up and put our family first when the day to day of life is always filled with busyness? That is something I’m still figuring out.

One thing while I was in Vermont was this overwhelming feeling that people genuinely cared about this state. Not in a gatekeeping kind of way, but in a way that was fostered out of the goodness of caring about your neighbors, your land, and for the benefit of all - something that seems entirely lost on a good chunk of Americans right now.

That feeling stuck with me so much so that I wound up crying at 6 am on the flight home. How can one single state foster something like that so easily and intentionally and back home in Wisconsin it’s like pulling teeth to even get some of my neighbors to interact with me?

Before I left for Vermont, I wound up grabbing a book, “Radio Free Vermont” by Bill McKibben. I began reading it shortly after getting home (I had two DNF’s while on vacation there, a queer cozy mystery that just felt very immaturely written, and another I had been trying to read that I felt lost in - photos attached below), and I’m so thankful that I read it. I devoured it. I read a quote, took a photo of it, and sent it off to my husband and many friends and we all agreed, this is what we feel that the world needs more of right now.

I may do more of a wrap-up down the line of Vermont. Lord do I want to share all the photos I took while on that trip. Right now though, the air still feels heavy. A few days before Halloween my mother in-law has surgery and I’ll be waiting on texts that day to hear that everything went well.

Life is bittersweet sometimes, and it feels like the blows just keep coming this fall despite trying to push through it all.