I Am My Family’s Angel of Death
And I’m Working on #4
I’m crying today. I woke up in a foul mood with my back on fire. I dumped yesterday’s coffee grounds all over the counter because I couldn’t be bothered to empty the green bin and really believed I could squeeze in one more thing. I put one contact lens in my eye inside out and caught a hair in the other. I got my daily “Good morning Mom ❤” text from the daughter who wakes up as Sunshine Personified every day and just about threw my phone in the toilet.
I escaped unseen to my office with my pot of well-earned coffee, and before I could even open the laptop, I broke down in tears.
I have spent the last nine years analyzing my crying patterns through grief, frustration, fear, and exhaustion, but today it feels different. And it took a while to figure out why.
This time round, it’s my mom.
I spent the day at the hospital with her again yesterday. She’s 82 and needs blood transfusions every other week because she can’t make her own red blood cells anymore. It’s called myelofibrosis. Typically, it onsets around age 64, often morphs into cancer, and has an average prognosis of four years. Mom’s starting Year 13.
She also has this little memory bubble of present tense she lives in, where she is perfectly intelligent and coherent, but…
