Advent Thoughts, #3

My mother has cancer.  She doesn't like me to say that, or to tell people, so I usually don't, not very much.  I don't want to say it to get sympathy, or to make an excuse as to why I can't do the dozens of unnecessary projects other people want me to do.  I tell because despite my exciting and fulfilling career, my fiction writing, and my doctoral work, her having cancer is the most important circumstance of my life right now.

What will 2013 bring for us?  A long, slow painful death, overseen by hospice, for my mother?  Unforeseen and unforeseeable stress on me as I try to balance it all?  A miracle of healing?  A semi-remission that means she lingers until some other health issue occurs.  Will we have Christmas again next year, or will this be the last one?

For 57 years Christmas has meant Christmas with my mother, even on those rare occasions when I did not spend it with her because we were too far apart (she in Maryland,  I in Chattanooga) or because we had an obligation to spend with my mother-in-law and my husband's family.  Her absence defined those particular Christmases as much as the ones spent with her.  I do not want to think of my mother wasting away, I do not want to think of hospice nurses, and I do not want to think of next Christmas without her, without her well decorated trees, her banana bread, and her silly worries about what to buy everyone for Christmas. 

Knowing--or believing, or fearing--that this will be our last Christmas together does not make me want to enjoy it more.  I often think she is in denial about her cancer, but I am just as much. 

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