Yesterday's appointment with the GI guy panned out just like we thought it would. He wants to see B for a colonoscopy. Which wouldn't be nearly as scary if it were being done as routine maintenance rather than as a reason for the pain and fever. And add some new and scary symptoms to the mix: he's lost four pounds in two weeks, and is experiencing some bleeding. Which we attributed to benign causes but now are beginning to wonder about. The GI guy was concerned.
B was awake most of the night last night, wrapped in his own blanket of apprehension. He didn't even pull close as he always does, with that far flung leg thrown possessively over mine. Instead, I felt him far away from me. I reached out a hand to touch him, and felt the tremor beneath my fingers, an electric current under his skin. He pushed back against my palm, taking comfort like a spooked horse seeking contact. And we slept that way. Or I thought we slept.
This morning he overslept the alarm, and was contrite. He said he'd been restless and unable to sleep. I felt guilty for not knowing.. for dozing so soundly while he wrestled with his demons there beside me.
(The girl came in white-faced yesterday evening. "My friend's mother just DIED", she said. "She went in to wake her up in the morning, and her mom was DEAD. She hadn't even been sick...")
"I was thinking about that girl and her mother," B confessed. "And worrying about all the 'what-if's." I knew what he meant. I knew what he wasn't saying. While I'd been sleeping, he'd been grieving.
His mother has been gone such a short time, and he's still hurting. We talk about her from time to time. I can see her there sometimes, a ghost behind his beautiful blue eyes. Her music still plays in his soul, and when it's quiet he cranes to hear it; searching for her comfort, somewhere.
Somewhere a girl woke up in the morning and found her mother, gone.
Somewhere a few short years and breaths ago, a man found his mother, gone. And now he lies here with something ticking inside his body that the doctors can't name, as the fear that shuns the daylight comes drifting in the dark reaches of the night while the house is silent and there's nothing left to distract it away.
I know his fear, or some of it. It's eddying around me today, as I sit here alone and he toils at home, prepping for the medical procedure tomorrow that will tell us what lies inside of him. I don't know what to pray for: that they don't find anything, which would leave him in unrelenting pain and illness for who-knows-how-much longer, or that they find something, which could be bad.
At least the PD has a name and a face. This thing, the unknowing, is the worst. And so we wait, and they wait with us: the ghost of his mother, and the spectre of the Big C. She can come along with us, for as long as we love, but God... we could surely leave the other behind.
Please, now... Amen.
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