Grief Tides

I found this post, written and neglected. Yet it reflects well the emotional tone of the past couple of years, so here goes.

I sit with elbows on my desk and head heavy in my hands. My eyelids keep trying to slide closed, though I tell myself I have to write. I want to write. But I feel sluggish and weighed down. It's like my internal organs came unhitched from their proper places and sunk down until they're all - heart, lungs, liver, spleen, stomach, kidneys, and the lot - a messy pile in the bowl of my pelvis; heavy on the bottom, empty on the top. I force myself to sit up straight, to log in to t

he blog, to begin to write.

Sometimes I'm nearly swept away by tides of sadness. Which I don't like to admit. I prefer to cop to getting down in the dumps only once I've clawed my way out again, once I've found inspiration and remembered how and why I get happy. The past six months - shepherding my sister over the bridge or through the gate from this life to wherever the heck we go after, and then missing her, and then asking the inevitable 'what's the point of it all' questions - have not made for verdant pastures of inspirational writing.

It was bad enough when my canine pal Nicholai died. So sorry I was that cancer took him away. It was hard not to feel like I'd failed him. After a lifetime on lawns and gardens without pesticides and herbicides, after a lifetime of high quality home-made food, after long walks and heaps of love, I imagined I had given my sweet dog what he needed to avoid the nasty big "C."
I was, of course, wrong. It wasn't the first time.

In 1995, I was a non-drinking, non-smoking, running yoga practitioner, a vegetarian and sometimes vegan, forty years old when I was diagnosed with colo-rectal cancer. It might not need saying, but I'll say it anyway: it rocked my world. I believed I was living a preventative lifestyle. But I was still exposed to whatever toxins float into our skies, fill our water, and linger on the leaves and stems and fruits of our foods. It was desparately difficult not to blame myself, to search my life for possible errors. Only much later, afer I pulled through my brush with the disease that eats us from the inside out, and after my dog died, and after my sister died too, I learned of the Superfund site just a few miles from my childhood home.

I don't know if the heavy metals that leached into the ground water supplying both our well and the Ten Mile Creek that flowed behind our home played a role in the development of cancer in myself and my sister. A brother too, developed tumors and almost all seven siblings have endocrine disorders of one sort or another. Might be genetics, might be coincidence, but a person has to wonder about the arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead, and zinc we took in with our drinking water.

At the end of the day, at the end of a life, it doesn't really matter why we get cancer. We'll all die of something and that's the tough reality.

Except...

I suspect ...

Many of these cancer deaths could be prevented. The half of all dogs over age ten who die from cancer, the ridiculous climbing numbers of human cancers - breast and prostate and pancreas and colon and lung and brain and lymph - the cancers in children and non-smokers ...

We'll all die one day and right now, I'm finding that in itself to suck.

But do so many of us have to die from cancer?