We sat for awhile on the carpeted floor of the small bedroom he’d grown up in, a leaning shelf of books towering over us. Framed pictures of his family were scattered about, and a bulletin board was covered in photos of boys with 90s haircuts, their arms slung over each others’ shoulders. I laughed, flipping through his senior yearbook, and ran my fingers across books about English literature, African history, law and politics. Though he hadn’t lived there for years, the room was thoroughly T, and a great opportunity to see the boy behind the man I have come to know and love.

As I stood up to hug him I suddenly realized I do not have such a past to show him. My old room, with its ridiculous horse wallpaper, has likely been stripped and repainted, redecorated to suit the tastes of a different little girl. I cannot laughingly explain that as a horse-crazy ten year old I gave names to each of the horses pictured on the border’s repeating pattern. There are not awkward photos of my gangly teenage self tucked into the corners of the mirror my mom purchased years ago at a church rummage sale. I will not explain the framed family photographs in our narrow hallway, on carpet worn thin by years of playing invented games of ‘horse’ and ‘hand soccer’ with my siblings.

I will not get to sit with a mug of coffee at the round antique table in our ivy-papered kitchen, overlooking my dad’s garden and the horse pasture, undulating with chest high grass and purple tufts of thistle, the gnarled old apple tree bending low in a corner of peeling fence I painted with my dad.

I have always believed that home is with the people I love. I still believe this. But what happens when I lose both the person I love, and the house that held so many precious memories of her? My mon died and suddenly the bricks of our enormous fireplace, the sheen of the oak china cabinet, and the old maple with our creaking tree house became precious. Holy, even. Imbued with my memories of her.

In selling my childhood home and moving away, I have come to better understand the emotions that motivate people to make shrines of the rooms of their departed loved ones. I know my mom is not coming back, but I could feel her so vividly when I sat in the overstuffed chair she used to grade papers in, or when I stood beside the old sewing table in the laundry room, or watched the finches on the feeder outside the kitchen window.

But now, even those bittersweet comforts belong to another family. Even now they are replacing the carpets, stripping wallpaper and painting walls. The treehouse is getting a new floor, the pasture fence some much needed repairs. They are, in short, beginning a lifetime of new memories in a house that is now their home.

It’s not that I wish this weren’t the case. It was necessary for my dad and step mom to get a new start. Life is not lived fully from inside a shrine to the past. But sitting on the floor in T’s room, surrounded by his books and photographs, with both his parents sitting a few rooms away downstairs, it was hard not to feel that the tangible portions of my own past are being steadily erased.

And while I tell myself that this is inevitable for all of us–houses are sold, schools remodeled, moves undertaken–the fading evidence of my past life leaves me feeling panicked.

My mom is trapped in that past. If I lose it, do I lose her? And without familiar kitchen cabinets, hallways, and door handles, how do I put her in context for those to whom she will never be more than a story?

The dusty road through Etoko

As a part of my job as an epidemiology Fellow, I presented a poster at a conference on tropical medicine in Philadelphia a few weeks ago. After four long days of research presentations, posters, and public health plenaries, I confess: I was exhausted. On Wednesday afternoon I had hoped to sneak away from the fray, and explore Philly–a city I’d never visited and whose rich history (at least by American standards) intrigued me. Instead, I was driven back inside by yet another gloomy day of rain. Instead of seeking out the liberty bell, I found myself at a conference presentation entitled, simply, “Compassion”.

The panelists included a number of public health giants, among them one of my personal heros, Bill Foege, and began with a video of a summit held at the Carter Center that had been attended by a small number of world leaders in health and development. The video simply chronicled their multi-day discussion on the meaning of compassion and its place in international health.

The dictionary definition of “compassion” states that it is “Sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others,” or, in other words, the desire “to suffer with” someone who is hurting. As the discussion of compassion played out at the conference video, Paul Farmer stated, in his typical frank and no-nonsense style, that he had worked all over the world, in Haiti, and Africa, and slums in Latin America, treating patients, and never once had he met someone who asked him to suffer with them. Compassion, he stated, was only useful for those suffering if it resulted in action to alleviate it. Consequential compassion, then, was what mattered.

The conference panel–many of whom had been a part of the original summit–had wonderful things to say about the need for and benefit of consequential compassion in international health. The conversation ranged: from the idea of society as a form of organized kindness, to Desmond Tutu’s quote

“A person is a person through other persons. None of us comes into the world fully formed. We would not know how to think, or walk, or speak, or behave as human beings unless we learned it from other human beings. We need other human beings in order to be human. I am because other people are. A person is entitled to a stable community life, and the first of these communities is the family.”

However, it was the question and answer session that truly moved me. A woman–a microbiologist studying lymphatic filariasis–stood up and told a story about a trip she took last year to Papua New Guinea. She spoke of night blood testing for the parasite (which is best detected in the hours around midnight to 2 a.m.), of praying that that her hosts and the community members with whom she was staying would be negative. She talked of hospitality and heart break, of a small line on a rapid test for the woman whose room she was sharing that cleaved her life into before and after. Her voice broke as she finished, and there were tears quivering in eyes around the room. She had told her story, but she had also told ours.

I think everyone in that room had returned–mentally and emotionally–to their own cleaving moments. To dusty clinics, to jungle outposts, to rainy season treks, to malnourished children in supplemental feeding lines, and women giving birth on battered tables in cinder block rooms hours away from a hospital. Or help.

My before-and-after moment in public health is inexorably connected to my mother.

Almost exactly five years ago I was doing patient intake in a dusty cement “clinic” in northern Cameroon. Hundreds of patients from the surrounding villages had walked to our clinic, which was being subsidized by our small group of college students and a partner NGO. We had enough money to pay for a single doctor to run the clinic for a week, and a small staff of health assistants. I was one of the students responsible for signing patients in, taking temperatures and blood pressures, as well chief complaints and brief clinical histories.

I went from patient to patient, tall, thin women seated on a battered bench along the chipped back wall. As I reached the end, I asked the woman seated there why she was visiting the clinic that day. She touched her chest, a couple of inches below her collar bone, and told me she had a lump in her breast. Her long-fingered hand rested there, above her heart, as I tried to control my breathing, the small muscles in my face. My own mother’s breast cancer had metastasized only weeks before this, though I had only told a handful of close friends at that point. Shakily, I asked the woman how long the lump had been there. “Two or three years,” was her heart-rending reply.

A few moments later I stepped out onto the back patio of the clinic, breathing hard. I stood looking out over the vast Cameroonian jungle, the sun just a hazy orb hanging in the red-dust air above the palm trees. All I could see, though, was the vast white hallways of the IU Medical Center, the rows of clear, dripping chemo bags, the glossy magazines on the wooden waiting room tables. I could hear the soft padding of the nurses’s rubber-soled shoes, the swish of the doctors’ long white jackets. I imagined the orange pill bottles lined up around the rim of my parents’ sink like sunbathers, the wigs perched upon their wooden stands, endless boxes of single use needles, and the neatly typed insurance forms that ended with $0.00 in the “Total Owed” column.

Here in Cameroon, the cost to simply travel to the nearest hospital–much less receive treatment–was simply beyond the resources of many members of this community. The harried doctor in the next room was under-supplied in an under-staffed remote clinic he would visit, at best, once a month. In the few days that I volunteered there I had already seen a complicated delivery, cerebral malaria, onchocerciasis, and pneumonia, not to mention a number of umbilical hernias, uncomplicated malaria, and a host of preventable childhood illnesses. It seemed that everyone was sick–the vast majority suffering from illnesses that we would find inconceivable by virtue of their ease of prevention here in the developed world.

My world split in two as I wrote down “Pain and lump in the upper portion of the left breast, present for 2-3 years” on that patient history form. Kneeling on a dusty cement floor I realized that my family and I, we were the lucky ones. We had access to health insurance, cutting edge treatments, and choices. The calculus of treatment–and diagnosis–was radically different for us because of those unearned privelages.

That cleaving moment led me to public health. It was the moment that gave my life and my career a direction and a purpose. But meeting that woman also provided me the lens through which to view my mother’s illness and my family’s own personal tragedy. Losing my mom was terrible, but gaining 3 years with her because of world-class treatments and dedicated, knowledgeable, and available physicians was a luxury and a gift that is at best unevenly distributed. What distinguished that woman in the clinic from my mother, other than the chances of birth and circumstance?

As the holiday season rolls around, I would be lying if I said I haven’t had some really dark moments. I miss my mom terribly. I always will. But as I think of her, I also wonder if there is another family in rural Cameroon that is also missing a wife and a mother–and who likely never received the benefit of treatment, or even of a diagnosis.

As bleak as a cancer diagnosis and the loss of a loved one can be, we (my family and I) are the lucky ones. We have experienced a privileged sort of suffering as the beneficiaries of options that are unavailable to vast portion’s of the worlds’ population. Cancer may strike randomly and be only partially preventable, but systematic inequality and the unequal distribution of resources are man-made. They are also subject to change.

That change, however, comes not just with a willingness to suffer with someone who is suffering, but with the willingness to act.

To have consequential compassion, as Paul Farmer might say.

Mom's antique cookie cutters

Almost exactly three years ago I was struck with the idea to write a blog detailing my experiences and perspectives as the daughter of a terminal cancer patient.  Publishing my thoughts online made them public, and reminded me each time I wrote, of the millions of others in similar circumstances.  It became a way for me to explain my inward turmoil to the world in a coherent way, thereby giving a sort of meaning and structure to some of the most chaotic and random-seeming experiences of my life.  Knowing that I had an audience helped to keep me from feeling sorry for myself, and made me pause to consider how others might be dealing with the same kinds of situations.

Over the course of the last three years, much has changed, in both my life and in this blog.  My readership widened slightly–eventually to include my mother and close family.  I have learned valuable lessons about humility and perspective, assumptions, and the lenses through which will all view our experiences.  I have explored a range of emotions, from anger and grief and joy, to loss and resilience.   This blog, and the process of writing it, has also helped me to better understand myself.

We are about three months away from the two year anniversary of my mother’s death, and less than a week away from what would have been my parents’ 28th wedding anniversary.  My dad has sold my childhood home, and moved towns.  He’s gotten remarried, and I have been reminding myself to buy Christmas ornaments for both my siblings and step-siblings this year.  Life trundles on.

There is much I have to say about my thoughts and emotions this holiday season.  While I have by-and-large been quite content and happy these past several months, there is nothing quite like the Christmas season to bring back nostalgia and the memories of seasons–and people–past.  I can almost feel the pine sap on my hands, and smell the crisp ceder-tinged air, and see the bobbing pom-pom on my mother’s knit hat as we clamored up and down hills to find the perfect Christmas tree.  I can see the smudged and dog-eared recipe cards scattered on the counter, the kitchen surfaces dusted with flour and cinnamon.  A Kenny G Christmas CD is playing on the stereo, and my mom is pulling golden-colored sugar cookies from the oven, brushing her hair out of her eyes, and bumping the door shut with a slim hip.  I can see her everywhere–running in from the cold laden with shopping bags, sitting on the floor of our living room curling red ribbons on a gift-wrapped package with one blade of a pair of scissors.  She is filling the tree–inside and out–with nearly 3 decades of Christmas ornaments.  She is presenting our neurotic beagle with a new rawhide bone, or making treat bags for her first graders in the shape of Frosty the Snowman, and directing me to brush the white cheeks of each one with her own Cover Girl blush.

From here in Atlanta it is easy to pretend that my mom is at home grading the semester’s final spelling tests, and rushing to finish up the last minute gift-buying, or preparing our late-night Christmas Eve dinner we share every year with friends.  A part of me still expects that she will be sitting with a candle at the end of our pew at the Christmas Eve church service, the glow of the flame glinting off of her glasses as she softly sings Silent Night with the congregation.  I want so badly to see her smiling, a mug of coffee in her hands, curled up in her robe in the corner of our front room couch on Christmas morning, as eager to see our excited faces as we are to see our gifts.  I want to wrap all the presents she bought because she doesn’t have time, and help her bake homemade cinnamon rolls for breakfast, or run to Wal-Mart for the 30th time because she forgot yet another crucial ingredient.

I am reduced to tears and stunned silences when I am confronted by the reality, however: A text message picture of the beautiful flower arrangement made to adorn my mother’s headstone, bursting with poinsettias.  Nearly two years later, and I can barely accept, much less stomach, the facts.  I will be visiting a cemetery plot this Christmas, in a town that is no longer home.  I will tell her how beautiful the flowers are, how many Christmas cookies dad’s eaten, about the size and shape of our tree, the gifts we’ve bought, the parties we’ve attended.  And she will be unbearably silent.

While most of what my piano instructor attempted to teach me failed to sink in long term, I do have one enduring memory. While learning to read music, I vividly recall the first time I came across a repeat symbol. At the time it brought to mind an image of a rubber wall: the notes bouncing off and returning again to the starting point, running through section once more. It always struck me as peculiar that the repeat seemed to disappear on the second run-through. I often wondered what it would be like to be stuck in an endless loop, unable to break through that elastic wall, left bouncing forever back to the beginning, never able to bring a song or a thought to completion.

I am stuck in just such a loop, it seems. No matter how sunny the interval, or how vividly and energetically it’s played, I inevitably hit that wall. I am sent back to the beginning, to a bright room in February, to a window with cardinals on the feeder outside. Fog frost is on the corn stubble in the fields and the bare stalks in our garden. And the breathing ghost of my mother lays, her eyes half open, on a rented hospital bed. I feel again that painful mix of dread, anticipation, desperation, and despair that I still don’t think makes sense to anyone who hasn’t dealt with the terminal illness of a loved one. I am consumed by the void left to me, and am plunged back into grief.

Only now, because of the happiness I’ve been relishing, these repeats have a jangling, shocking quality, like being plunged into icy cold water. It takes your breath away.

I realized today, after being anxious for the better part of this week for no discernible reason, that I am simply sad. Only this time I am fighting it. I don’t want to hit the repeat again. I am tired of this section of the song. I have been so…joyful. I am lulled each time I’m happy into thinking that that is the new normal, my rediscovered baseline. That my song has found its resolution.

Instead, the lesson I am learning as summer fades back into fall, is how to be both happy and sad again. I was emotionally devastated–barely getting by–for so many months, that happiness has been intoxicating. I don’t want to let it go. But life is not an endless series of dreary experiences and grey days, but nor is it all sunshine and pleasant emotions. This is normal. To have great days, and awful days book-ending the mundane and the ordinary moments that comprise most of our lives.

Re-grieving my mom in short (and sometimes long) bursts will be a theme repeated often through the song of my life. I hope, though, to learn to relish the happy moments, and perhaps to also savor the sad. Missing my mom puts the world into a certain color. It produces poetry and deep thinking and quiet moments in my life that would never be there otherwise. These repeats have found expression through this blog, and it is my great hope that these words have benefited others in a similar situation.

Maybe there is no way through that wall. Maybe I have been consigned to repeat this section of the song at intervals throughout my life. But I think I am learning to be OK with that.

written in ink

that I must carry in my hands–

unprotected.

And time pours down like the rain.

Though I clutch you to my chest

already you are smudged around the edges,

letters blurring together,

words disappearing, blotched and spreading.

But I cannot hold

your details in my head

So that when I arrive

at the alter to face my husband

or receive a red and squalling newborn at my breast

I fear that I will have nothing left

to tell them.

Just ink-stained hands

and tears,

and the desperation

of not forgetting.

Timing is a funny thing.  Less than 24 hours after writing that post I found myself on a park bench on the receiving end of a goodbye speech from a guy I really liked and had spent a lot of time with over the summer.  He was, if not the catalyst, than certainly a player in my rediscovery of the best parts of myself.  I spent a lot of time laughing this summer, soaking up innocent and simple happiness, and mostly feeling like my old self.  The girl I was before I lost my mom.  It was, in a word, glorious.

In the hour we spent talking on that park bench, I discovered something deeper than the ability to laugh until it hurts again.  I realized just how far I have come:  I have survived something terrible, and I have learned from that experience.  I may be so grief-stricken at times that I feel as though my world is splitting in half, but I have not been broken.  I have gotten up everyday and chosen to live my life.  Since my mom died I have finished my masters and been accepted to a PhD program.  I’ve made and grown incredible friendships.  I’ve visited seven new countries, bought a car, moved apartments, ended a relationship and begun new ones.  I’m still here.  Bruised and battered, yes, but stronger for it.

And I’m proud of that.  For the first time in my life I’m unabashedly proud of myself.  I sat on that park bench and took the break up like a champ.  Grace with calloused hands.

This all came to head during the conversation when he asked me if I was going to “be ok”.  There were allusions to a tail spin, and then I couldn’t help it: I started to laugh.  A deep laugh from my belly that I couldn’t quite get a grip on.  I know given the context that it was a little heartless of me, but I couldn’t help it.  Images and memories from the last 18 months flashed through my mind, and I couldn’t help but think that sitting on a park bench under light from a full moon is a pretty lovely way to get dumped.  And that, in the larger scheme of things, this moment served more to highlight the fact that I am, even now, Ok.  Happy even.  Things will never all be perfect.  I will never have a grip on every thread in my life, and something is bound to start unraveling at the worst possible moment.

But I realized, there on a few feet of painted pine boards, that I don’t do tail spins.  I have always been given enough to get through, and I am confident in myself and what I can handle.  I have grown strong.  I am familiar with suffering.  I know what it is to cry every day, to feel lonely in a crowded room, to want nothing more than to be held so that I can cry and cry and cry.  But I can also sit and smile to myself when life takes an unexpected swerve.  Because I have myself, and it is a self that I have learned to love.  It’s a grace with knitted bones.

My mom had it, and she showed it to me again and again until it stuck.  She was a woman with poise and determination, a woman who knew herself and the way she saw the world, who chose to be happy and to live her life on her own terms, even against impossible odds.  Grace with her head up.  Grace with a steady eye.

I have an image I look to in those park-bench moments.  It’s a woman on a cliff of some kind, her hands in fists at her side, her shoulders thrown back and her feet set hard, out wide.  The wind is blowing her hair around her face, and she has a triumphant, fierce, and intensely proud look in her eye.  An upraised chin.  A knowing little half-grin.  Calloused grace with outstretched fingers, and a quiet sort of knowing that the hold will be there, and that she will be able to reach it.

For the last 18 months or so, I have avoided being alone.  I threw myself into work and school.  Called friends. Made plans.  Stayed busy.  To be alone is to think, and to think is to end up, inevitably, in sadness.  After the year anniversary of my mother’s death, I just didn’t want to be sad anymore.

I am not a sad person by nature.  I think of myself as a realist, and I’m honest about how I feel, what I want, and what I’m struggling with.  I tend to be fine articulating my internal machinations.  But I don’t tend to brood.  I write, or talk it out, or cry violently for short spurts, and then I look for ways to be happy again.

Losing my mom hasn’t worked like that.  I am only now realizing that I thought it would.  I have discovered this week that I approached grief like so many other parts of my life: if I worked hard, did my best, and tried to do things “right”, that I would succeed. Overcome.  Deal.  I thought I could beat grief by force of will and being “good” at it.

I have been heartbroken to discover that it doesn’t work that way.  I feel like I’ve done everything right.  I try to get enough sleep at night.  I journal.  I’ve spoken to therapists and friends.  I’ve cried.  I’ve laughed.  I’ve gone out with friends, set goals, volunteered, traveled.  I’ve exercised, drank rarely and never when I’m sad.  I’ve done what I thought my mom would have wanted, and what she herself would have done.  I’ve tried to avoid complaining, or feeling sorry for myself.  I’ve concentrated on things that I’m thankful for.  Tried to remain calm and wait it out.  Tried to tell myself–and to actually believe–that this, too, shall pass.

This summer I’ve had glimpses of my old self.  I was thrilled to discover that I was still capable of being that happy and optimistic.  The future suddenly seemed brighter, full of possibility.  I was waking up smiling.  I felt, for the first time in months, that I wasn’t constantly on the verge of falling apart.

I felt like I had shut a door, or started a new chapter.  That I could finally put grief to bed, so to speak, and start feeling better.  Or at least something other than an unrelenting sadness, always waiting for me to slow down or for the world to get quiet before creeping up again.

I thought I could “finish” grieving, but it appears that may not be the case.  I’ve tried to do everything right, and I still have periods of crushing sadness.  I have days and weeks that make me cry much more often than I would like to admit.  And, worst of all, my mom is still gone.  And I am still left mourning her.

Perhaps these cycles will be spread further apart as time goes on.  Perhaps they will lessen in intensity and duration.  Maybe I’ll just get better at coping with them.  But the hard truth is, losing my mom at 25 has changed me, in many ways (good and bad) those changes are irreversible.  I am still trying to create a worldview in which tragic and unexpected loss plays a real part, while I am also able to remain optimistic and hopeful.  It is a long, slow process.

As hard as I try, though, I am often not happy with where I am and how I’m feeling.  Honestly, I hate being this person.  I abhor crying to my friends, being clingy or needy, and not being able to “handle” my life.  I hate feeling broken, emotionally out of control, and sad.  Just so damn sad.  I hate the part of me that just wants to be held, and longs for someone to carry part of this burden.  I hate that no matter what I do, nothing fixes the void inside of me that my mother left.  Her dying deprived me of a mom and a friend, forever altered parts of myself, and transformed the way I see the world and my place in it.  Some of those changes are hard to swallow.  On days when I feel this way, I don’t want to be this person.  I want to be strong and independent, capable, hopeful, coping, and happy.  I hate feeling like the word “floundering” would most aptly describe my emotional state so many days each week.

It has been somewhat humbling to realize how much I need the people in my life.  I am incredibly lucky to have such a wonderful group of friends and family, who let me cry and talk in endless circles about a situation that is not, at it’s basest level, ever going to change.  Death is permanent, and though I am malleable, reshaping my life around this loss feels almost impossible sometimes.  Sometimes it feels so futile to cry, or talk about it again (and again, and again, and again) because nothing ever seems to change.  Certainly not the situation, and so far, not my essential feelings, either.

I was thinking today about what I would change in this situation, or ask for, in order to cope with it better.  As I was contemplating this half-hearted sort of prayer, it occurred to me what I really wanted to ask for:

If I had a wish at this moment, I would wish for grace.

Grace is obviously a fairly heavy religious word, laden with different sorts of meanings.  When I say grace, though, I am thinking about rock climbing.

I have spent the summer doing a lot of climbing.  In addition to scrambling up walls myself, the sport involves a lot of time spent watching other people climb, belaying for them, or offering spots, encouragement, or advice on where to go next.  I especially enjoy watching my female friends climb.  Compared to the men we climb with, the female climbers are considerably shorter.  We are a wiry bunch, but obvious possess a great deal less brute strength than the guys.  Where a much stronger 6’2″ male can often just stand up to reach the next hold, the girls typically have to utilize less straightforward approaches, especially on the tougher routes. But the approach is often beautiful to watch.  Instead of brute strength or long arms, these women rely on balance, flexibility, form.  The women are graceful, finding holds, stretching, balancing on the tips of toes and fingers.  They are nimble, fluid, agile.  Watching them is a lot like watching a dancer, or an artist.

That is the kind of grace I am asking for as I continue to deal with my grief and loss.  A combination of flexibility and strength, the ability to move slowly, to trust my body, to lean into the wall.  To use the pull of gravity, the shape of a hold, my own heft and strength.  Grace to take direction, or let a friend hold me on the rope for a moment while I reassess my route, chalk my hands, shake out my tired arms.

If I had to ask for anything right now, it would be this kind of grace.

Grace to breath through the hardest moments.  Grace to cry without apology.  Grace to articulate my thoughts without coloring them with drama, or reacting in emotion.  Grace, perhaps most of all, to love myself despite my great needs, and to realize that these broken places are part of what makes all of us–and me–human.

There is no finish line to grief, no matter how “well” (or poorly) I handle it.  I’m not going to succeed in bringing my mom back to me, or in returning to my pre-loss self, or even in being happy all of the time.  I am simply asking for the grace to accept these truths, and to just stand here, breathing, in the moment.  Come what may.

I trusted implicitly–

without knowing–

in a benevolent future.

All the while

she grew thin and grey

in a hospice bed

raised high enough to see the cardinals

on the feeder outside her window.

The red birds have since left

eating thistle seeds outside other rooms.

Her death taught me about grief

and longing.

But ours was the lucky situation.

What of the others–

to whom the expensive language of chemotherapy

and insurance schemes is foreign and unfamiliar?

What of the others–

separated from us only by chance?

It is not death or grief that frightens me,

but a world in which the blows are random,

where we are remembered, or watched over,

unevenly.

Left to pray and doubt

even the god of the smallest things.

For years I have tended towards a casual sort of solipsism.  Not that I believe that the world outside of my mind is a figment, but rather than I am the only one I have an actual shot at getting to know.  Grief was a violent separation from that person I thought I understood in myself.  But lately I have been rediscovering, like daffodil shoots in April, that the promise of renewal exists.  It’s not the same flowers that reemerge, of course, but they’re related.  Flowers that–over time–are improved by the pressures that act on each new generation.

Right now, I am simply hoping for a chance at some healing.  I am desperate for an opportunity to catch my breath, tend to my bruises, continue growing stronger.  Honestly, I just want to get to the point where I am no longer knitting my pains together, a trailing skein of hurts and disappointments that haunt me every time something painful happens.  I want to feel again that a disappointment is an aberration, a bump in the road, temporary–rather than part of a series of connected setbacks woven together into a cohesive narrative.  (I feel like the designer of the Titanic in that way–eager to compartmentalize disaster.  Unfortunately my life sometimes feels more like that ship’s reality.  Frigid water over-running the partitions like liquid in an ice-cube tray)

I am learning, slowly.  It’s been a series of humbling lessons, as I experience set-backs even in the midst of my timidly growing happiness.  Over the last 18 months I’ve gone from someone who saw herself as strong, capable, a good listener, and mostly “together”, to a girl who sobs to her friends and can’t stop talking about herself.  I don’t want to mourn like this anymore.  I don’t want to always be thinking of myself.  I am wrestling with Joan Didion’s question of self-pity.

The flashes of joy are becoming more frequent, though.  Happiness more than just a possibility.  The oscillations are slowing, reaching less and less away from the center.  I am encouraged.

To be honest, for the first time in my life, I’ve found myself almost wishing that things could be just a bit boring for awhile.  Right now, I might be willing to swap ecstasy (and it’s flip-side, depression) for a humble serving of contentment.

For the past several weeks I have been wrestling with the direction I want to take with my life.  After a dismal attempt at unofficially “couples matching” my medical school boyfriend of 4+ years and I parted ways, him to a residency program in New Hampshire, and me planning to start an Epi PhD program at the University of Arizona after a summer stint at CDC in Atlanta.  That had not been my first-choice program.  In fact, had it not been for UA’s ortho residency program and appealing climate (at least to my cyclist former boyfriend), it never would have even been on my radar.  There weren’t any glaring reasons not to go, though.  After a series of major life setbacks this spring, I had set my sights on Tucson, and was determined to make the best of the situation.

The thing was, by the end of June I still hadn’t started looking for apartments in Arizona.  I had yet to sign up for classes, had no idea when I would be moving, and was settling into a life and a routine in Atlanta that I was decidedly enjoying.  For the first time that I can remember, I was completely unexcited about moving, starting fresh, exploring new opportunities.  For a girl who daydreams about her next big trip during idle moments, this was definitely odd.  It was slowly dawning on me that I didn’t actually want to move to Arizona.

On a whim, on my couch, at midnight in late June, I wrote a profile on an internet dating website.  Mostly it was an effort to meet some people outside of public health, to have some fun, and make an effort to move forward, at least a little, with my life.  Truth be told, I was getting pretty tired of being sad.  A few fun dates to help me “get back on the horse”.  Some entertainment before my big move.  A reason to smile and dress nice for someone.  That’s what I told myself I wanted.

Timing and intentions can be funny.  A coffee date and a concert, a tall boy with hazel eyes and an infectious smile, quickly turned my plans upside down, and put the spark to the tender of my already-ambivalent feelings about Arizona.  A few dates, some long conversations, a first kiss that gave me butterflies, and I was suddenly taking that small voice seriously when she asked, “Do you honestly want to leave?”

I still haven’t told him–won’t until this Sunday when he gets back from Haiti–but slowly I’ve been poking around, checking out my options.  I was torn and stressed, but only because of the seeming lack of logic in my feelings.  I have been a goal-setting, ambitious, independent woman.  Linear, logical.  I make a goal, make a plan, and work towards that with focus and drive.  Goals and plans change, sure, but for a long time, it seems, I’ve known what I wanted and worked to get it.  A full-ride to Arizona, even if it wasn’t what I’d originally envisioned, made too much sense to pass up.

But as time (and endless conversations with my best friends and family) passed, the feeling grew stronger.  ”Stay,” my heart told me, my friends told me, my dad told me.  I told myself I would need a substitute, a solid plan B, a reason more tangible than a growing feeling.  So I sent some e-mails, stewed, cried, fretted.  Made some phone calls.  Fretted some more.  Repeated myself in an endless loop to anyone who would listen.  Waited.  Stressed.  Drove myself (and everyone around me) fairly crazy.

Last weekend I drove across town to meet some friends and grab a few drinks.  Country music was on the radio (it’s been a nostalgic summer).  The sun was setting over Atlanta.  And suddenly, it was as though my mother was there in the car with me.  Or, more precisely, we were sitting on the counter top in our kitchen back in Indiana.  I could hear, sense, imagine, see, what she was saying to me.  ”You are doing the right thing, Kristen.”  She told me that she was proud, that I was doing a great job, and to just trust that it would all work out.  I felt her smile, her approval, her support.  I couldn’t help but cry as I drove down Scott Boulevard, shaky from the realness of that moment, her immediacy, her presence.  I was thrilled, terrified, excited, afraid to trust, but full of peace at the same time.

As I write this, less than a week later, I have been offered a dream job at CDC.  It includes good pay, insurance, international travel, and complex data analysis under an excellent mentor, and with a fabulous set of bosses.  The project will include potential data collection and pilot projects in Africa, and would feed straight into a dissertation should I reapply to Emory’s PhD program (the exact place I’ve wanted to be all along).

I have not been so happy in years.  I am completely beside myself, unable to focus, prone to fits of crazy smiling.  My life has not fallen into place this seamlessly since the glorious pre-cancer days.  The last 2 or 3 years have contained a numbing series of setbacks.  I love my life, and it has been colored by incredibly good fortune.  I have always known love.  But I had gotten to the point where I was afraid to trust that anything in my life, no matter how hard I worked, would just “work out.”   Bad things, sometimes really terrible tragedies, befall us and are impossible to predict.  Growing up for me was a realization that the worst sometimes does happen, and sometimes it happens to me.  And that you can’t ever just start over after that.

Even with my mother’s voice, I was afraid to believe that this situation could be any different.  But I found myself praying, for the first time in months, and I found my prayers shifting from “opening doors” to “please let me stay”.  I found my intentions moving from determined job-waiting to mental e-mail drafts where I told Arizona I was deferring regardless of my employment situation in Atlanta.

My boss told me today that 10 minutes after we’d spoken about job opportunities for me, her boss had come in telling her, “We have extra money to spend before the end of the fiscal year.” My boss quickly replied, “I know just how you can spend that money.”  Just like that, a job–a GREAT job–was born.  When I told my family about my good fortune, my uncle texted me, “Your mom would be so proud.”  I know she is.

So now I am staying up late house hunting in Atlanta.  Searching for potential roommates, daydreaming about neighborhoods, furniture, and riding my bike to work.  I am planning a trip to Sweden and northern Europe in August.  I am imagining various ways to update that handsome, hazel-eyed boy about the fact that I am no longer planning to move across the country at some yet-to-be-determined date in August.

This isn’t starting over.  The events of the past 18 months have changed me, irrevocably.  And that is not a bad thing.  Every hard moment, every closed door, failed attempt, and rejection letter.  The break-up, the elimination of funding for my old CDC job, and every award or honor I didn’t get.  It all led right here.  To a moment when I can barely see to type, for all the happy tears.  When I can sit here and say that I know myself.  That I have learned to be more introspective and attentive to the desires of my own heart.  I can celebrate making it through another day without completely succumbing to cynicism or despair.  I know that my mom is still with me, even if, for the most part, I recognize that by seeing her in me.  It has been the hardest 18 months of my life, by far.  But I have learned.  I have grown.  And it makes being here, at this point in my life, worth some serious celebration.

It makes me want to plan a pilgrimage, build an alter, stand on a mountain and scream and wave my fists.  I am a survivor.  And I am more grateful than I can possibly communicate in words.

And though this, too, shall pass, this is a triumph, a moment, a period, that I will never forget.  I made my mom proud.