Friday - September 04, 2009
Endings and Beginnings - August 2009
August started with a series of steep hills and a long push to a special finish line: Sarah and Chris participated in the Pan Mass Challenge as a father-daughter team. It's a cycling event that raises funds for cancer research at Dana Farber (where Jessie was a patient for 6 years). It is Chris's fourth PMC, and Sarah's first PMC. Other families and friends from Ipswich also rode as parent-child teams. Congratulations to Bright Happy Power riders: Chandler, Linda, Mark and Sidney, Matt, Erica and Luke, and the many other Ipswich cyclists who also rode to help support cancer research.
We see other cancer families along the PMC route...at its beginning and end, also riding in memory of their children. We ride...in memory of those who died along the way, and in celebration of those who survive. At the finish line, mommy and friends cheer and holler, and snap team photos.
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August started with a series of steep hills and a long push to a special finish line: Sarah and Chris participated in the Pan Mass Challenge as a father-daughter team. It's a cycling event that raises funds for cancer research at Dana Farber (where Jessie was a patient for 6 years). It is Chris's fourth PMC, and Sarah's first PMC. Other families and friends from Ipswich also rode as parent-child teams. Congratulations to Bright Happy Power riders: Chandler, Linda, Mark and Sidney, Matt, Erica and Luke, and the many other Ipswich cyclists who also rode to help support cancer research.
We see other cancer families along the PMC route...at its beginning and end, also riding in memory of their children. We ride...in memory of those who died along the way, and in celebration of those who survive. At the finish line, mommy and friends cheer and holler, and snap team photos.
August also includes visits with family in New Jersey and Ohio: cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents. Those special bonds are strengthened by extended time walking, talking, swimming, playing games and sharing meals. Life moves along for everyone, and other family members face extreme challenges in their own lives: transformative surgeries, breast cancer treatment, recovery from addictions, rebuilding sober lives, living with acute and chronic illnesses such as diabetes and aggressive cardiac disease, financial and career struggles, care-giving for very young and very old family members, and just the day to day balancing-act of raising families...we hold our loved ones up to the light.
Summer has worked its transformation. We're more tan. Easier in our bodies and more comfortable with the liberties of sunshine and heat: exposed toes in flip-flops and sandals, bare arms in short sleeves or tank tops, and vulnerable knees and not-so-tan skinny legs in shorts.
We're changed. Impatient with rain and overcast skies. Our relationships to our surroundings are more open: windows and doors are flung wide so the world seeps in and our lives peep out. We step outdoors easily, and bring layers and umbrellas with us, but don't usually need them. We stay outside whenever we can, as long as we can. We peel off what's not needed, and get closer to the grit of sand and the sting of salty ocean and the hot kiss of the sunlight. We risk mosquito bites for a few more balmy moments outside.
We're active, but not quite so disciplined about schedules. We're spoiled by hand-picked vegetables from Appleton and local farmer's markets, and fish fresh from Gloucester's fleet, and outdoor meals. Storms have blown through, but we've totaled plenty of good days for biking, grilling, picnicking, kayaking, beaching (is that a verb?), or dancing at twilit concerts at Castle Hill (with some twilit mosquito slaps thrown in).
Like the mercurial summer weather, hot and cicada-buzzed one moment, stormy and wind-whipped the next, our family is driven hard by changes. Relationships are fraught with tension, and then periods of calm and good humor. These days, family communication isn't always easy or pretty. Sometimes it's totally silent, as we withdraw into our private spaces. Sometimes it's loud and angry, filled with slammed doors and hurt feelings, as we all try to fit together and figure out our new roles: daughter growing into a young woman and parents of an almost-adult. Sometimes, for a small space, it's laughing and reflective, confident and loving. But we DO talk and share ourselves with each other. We're not always at our best. We're real. We're imperfect. But we're present for each other...as best we know how. Occasionally, we get it right, and we hold tight to those moments, because they seem rare and hard to earn.
We're all growing up together...this family of three, and one who is among us, but not here to hold our hands or add her voice to the mix.
And, oh, as summer winds down, we're skittish about giving it all up: our sense of freedom, our periods of forgetfulness. Like most seasons, August comes with endings and beginnings. School starts tomorrow. Busy schedules commence, early mornings resume, and cool weather nips at our heels.
Backpacks come out. We fill them with the promise of unlined pages and sharpened pencils, fresh pens and charged calculator batteries. We lay out new jeans and shoes, sweatshirts and notebooks. Forms are filled out, medical exams completed, everything in seeming order.
Underneath the newness that comes with a schoolyear, we have our summer tans and mosquito bites, our late-night habits and hard-to-wake-up blues. We're not quite ready. Ever. For this change.
For any change. It comes along, whether we're prepared are not. And we find our way.
In our family, Sarah's growing up and away. She'll be a sophomore at Ipswich High School. Independent. Determined to make her own choices and be herself. Setting her own priorities. Discovering herself and her place in the world. Balancing the need to just 'be' a teen for a little while, with the richness of friends and loves, after-school pastimes and academic challenges, and then to look ahead to her future as an adult, and take steps that lead her toward long-term goals: college and career.
And as other children prep for the return through school doors, we ache with emptiness, too. For all of us...Jessie will always be 9 years old. She cannot share the adventures of her classmates as they move up to middle school, or begin their last year at Winthrop Elementary. We catch our breath at the rush of first-day-back-to-school memories...kerchiefs on her head, tights on her legs, grin on her face, tugging at a grown-up hand and then pulling loose, walking ahead, as she traveled eagerly to her first day in class. Wanting to be among her friends, at her desk, with her teachers.
Change isn't easy. It hurts. It aches. It stretches us. It pulls us out of old familiar shapes and ways, into new forms and connections. Ouch. Oh.
As September slips closer, we are carrying crisp summer tan lines, outdoor scuff marks, busy scrapes and old-time scars of lives that have been exposed and vulnerable. Summer months. Cancer years. Those times we have lived openly, wholly, with purpose and without caution, because we could and must and dared.
The tan lines will fade, the bruises and scabs will heal as the autumn comes. But we'll rub them thoughtfully, and purse our lips, remembering.
And we'll earn new ones: marks and scars. Because we go on living. We'll continue to be too loud when we should be quiet, speak to fill the silence when we should simply wait and listen, stand with crossed arms when we should reach out with an embrace, stay up too late when we should rest in readiness for whatever comes next, or push too hard as we try to stay busy and involved, and then need to pause and catch our breath. We'll make mistakes. But we'll learn. We'll get it wrong. And sometimes...we'll get it right. And all of it...all of it is living.
The journey continues.