February is a month of Valentines and snow squalls and sudden thaws. The seasonal changes bare what's underneath, then cover them up again. The landscape of New England is sometimes stark: white snow striped by long blue shadows, and sometimes ugly: mud and dirt churned and flung about. A fitting month for the ugly truths of grief and loss. 

Past postings have often been euphemistic and symbolic. We talked in metaphors about winter trees and spring blossoms. Long sleeps and awakening life. Poetry. Symbols. Comparisons that create distance between our personal lives and what has happened within them. We used language that created space. Safety. Maybe clarity and boundaries.

It's a compulsion, trying to make meaning out of circumstances over which we had no control. Trying to create purpose out of the aftermath. To learn lessons. To find hope. To create a legacy. To impose order. 

We'd like to make Jessie's cancer and subsequent death, and all the experiences we endured along the way, and all the ones that have occurred since that time, into a spare and rhythmic song or story. Something you can hold onto. Read. Digest. Smile over. Sigh over. Carry away inspiration from. Remember. 

A tale you can continue thinking about...because somehow it has been made beautiful, or palatable, or significant. As a line of verse. A rhyme. An image. A painting. A photo. 

And yes, all of those elements are true. In some ways, we aren't able to remember the entirety of an experience. It's too much, when it's in close-up focus with every gritty painful not-so-pretty detail. We remember in broad strokes and condensed summaries.  

After all, human beings can carry the conceptual memory of pain, but we cannot continue feeling it as we recall it, or we'd never dare to touch or move again. We forget the actual experience of pain, though we learn lessons from it. We distill sensory experiences into something that is contained in words and images, but cannot once more be physically recalled. Once over, it is gone, though it has blazed pathways through our neural connections and our emotional topography, and left its mark.

Except pain's not gone. And you cannot stuff the entirety of all that's happened to our family, and every other family challenged in such ways, into paragraphs about blank snowfalls and midnight stars and new moons and cold frosts and first thaws. 

Sometimes we need raw language. Shocking words. Expletives. Curses and swears. Sometimes we need visceral, emotional explosions. Confrontations. Denials. Shouts. Primal screams. Angry tears and swollen red eyes and hiccupping, raspy voices and clenched fists and restless, stomping feet. 

We need to be real. Unedited. Uncensored. Not so pretty. Broken. Damaged. Wounded. Uncertain if we'll make it. Unable to make promises or take vows. Doing our best, but not always being in very good shape along the way.

This month, let us be frank. The journey isn't over. We all continue. But the aftermath of long years with cancer continues to impact our family, challenging us in unexpected ways, and continuing to take a toll. 

On paper, we look pretty good. Sarah has great grades, she's an honors student who is busy with enriching and challenging extracurriculars in dance, song, band and track plus community service through organizations such as Rotary Interact. Chris is a partner in an architectural firm that's stable despite the economy, and active as a civic leader by his participation in Rotary and church and other initiatives such as raising funds for cancer research through bike rides like the PMC. Gail continues running a non-profit foundation that helps other cancer families and has resumed steady freelance work as a writer. 

Does that sound good? Sure. 

What isn't so obvious, when you greet us in the coffee shop or catch us on the street or run into us at the library or chitchat after church is that we're just getting by. Going through the motions. Trying to do what we should, or what's necessary or expected. 

We have habits that sometimes take the place of intimacy. Sometimes we sit down to a meal together. Or go on a family outing. Or have a conversation that's not just about schedules or social stuff. It's a struggle. Sometimes. Sometimes we don't even achieve these routines.

Each member of this family is lost and confused and compromised. Although we're each desperate for connection, we are isolated from each other and often unable to be present in the ways that make a difference. We are very broken. 

We don't know if we'll heal...not in the way we once believed we would. We'll keep functioning. We'll graduate and work and participate in the community. We'll try to be a family, although that's not a certainty anymore. 

We'll keep going. But we're not the same. We're changed. And wounded beyond belief. You cannot see the hurt. You cannot fix it. But the cancer and the journey through it continues to claim lives in different ways. 

We'll always try to find meaning and purpose. Why bother living if you don't? It's our nature to do so. But for once, despite all the opportunities to turn words into something startlingly beautiful or visually compelling, we won't. We have created those illusions too often, and even believed in them, when underneath was a hurt and a loss that was costing us ourselves and our family and our connections to our friends and community. 

So we offer you the aching bare language of bewilderment, confusion, anger, betrayal, sorrow, despair, exhaustion, grief and many other destructive emotions. They're part of this journey. They're real. They do damage. They're always part of it, and the less numb we become, the more we ask of ourselves as we try to reclaim life, and the more these feelings emerge and the more hurt it seems we truly are. 

Dark feelings, and we don't know what to do with them. We work with counselors and healers. We try. We don't let go easily, but we also are starting to see just how much damage has occurred...and we don't yet realize the enormity of the challenge to try to recover. It's overwhelming. Exhausting. 

What comes next? Can we be healed? Is it possible? And what would healing look like for each of us? We don't know. Right now, there's no other answer. We don't know. There's no roadmap or guidebook. Just us, trying to find a path.

The journey continues.