grief and joy

July 30, 2021

tworedbowls

Well, I know that once again, it has been awhile since I’ve said hello on this little blog. As you might have seen, my brother passed away earlier this year, and not long after that, we had our third baby. It has been a lot to process in a relatively short time.

My brother was diagnosed with colon cancer late last summer. I haven’t written much about his illness, because it didn’t feel like my journey to share. It still doesn’t, not least because it feels impossible to put into words. But I do want to memorialize in some small way how extraordinary he was (and is), and how incredibly hard he fought, with a fortitude and courage of spirit that I truly cannot fathom. He was constantly buoyant as a general rule, full of jokes and love for everybody, but during this ordeal he was indefatigable—when I would have been bitter or angry, he was calm, steady, and even cheerful. It was a distillation of the things that made him such a light in this world and to those of us around him.

Jeremy came here to Los Angeles for in-home hospice in late April. Especially in the uncertainty of this pandemic, that he was here with Andrew and me in our home, for any time at all, is something for which I will always be grateful. He passed away in May, and I miss him each and every moment.

Fiona was born exactly one month after my brother had to leave. Although it’s kind of silly, I feel like she chose to arrive on that date, a comfort to us in the strangest and hardest of times. And on the whole, her delivery was uneventful. Maybe someone can tell me if this is typical of later pregnancies, but other than feeling absolutely enormous, I didn’t really experience any of the false alarms or discomfort that I did when we were waiting for Clara. I went to my 38-week obgyn appointment expecting to find that I wasn’t dilated at all. Instead, I was told that I was already 2 centimeters dilated and the baby could come “any time.” And then I went home and promptly went into labor. A little more than 12 hours of labor and just 15 minutes of pushing later, our beautiful Fiona was in the world, 7 pounds, 13 ounces, and 21 inches long.

Andrew has been, even more than he always is, a rock throughout this entire year. I feel words are inadequate for so much of what happened, but here, again, I’m not sure I can describe how grateful I am. He met head-on the enormous physical, mental, and emotional labor that comes from in-home hospice care, something I certainly didn’t fully understand before we went through it, and did everything from finding a hospice agency, to installing privacy curtains in our living room and nailing dry-erase boards to the wall, to checking medications, taping down nasal tubes, and learning how to inject a blood thinner, the list goes on. Without him, I don’t know how I would have navigated all of the wild emotions of this past year, and, now that Fiona is here, he is wrangling the big kids tirelessly while I nurse and cuddle our chubby little one.

Speaking of the big kids, they have also been so very wonderful. We were worried about how they’d handle being in a hospice setting, but they adjusted to all the strange changes to their routines without a single complaint, and brought much-needed sunshine around, utterly unfazed by all the medical equipment in ways that only babies can be. And on a lighter note, they have been just the best with Fiona. We thought Luke would be indifferent to yet another little sibling, and that Clara might have some trouble adjusting to not being the baby anymore, but instead they both dote like crazy on Fiona (if sometimes a little more roughly than we’d like). This morning’s refrain from Luke was, “We love our baby!”

I don’t know that I will ever not find it unspeakably unfair that my brother, so full of life, exuberance, and utter joy, went through what he did. His loss has made me fearfully aware of how fragile this life is, and how much it can change in an instant. But I am doing my best, thanks to three precious little people and my steadfast B2, to be grateful for each day we have and for the irreplaceable memories of my brother that remain.

And in that sense, it feels good, in a bittersweet way, that Fiona’s birthday is a mirror of sorts of when Jeremy passed. Going into labor, I felt a painful symmetry in so many things, as minute as watching a nurse take my blood pressure after we’d kept such a close eye on my brother’s just a few weeks before. But a friend of mine commented that he had once read that our relationships with the world and our loved ones are a part of a “constantly moving wheel, where the spirits and memories of the past push you forward to the future.” My pregnancy was always going to be tied to my brother’s illness, for obvious reasons. Yet I’m glad of that, because although I feel his physical absence so acutely, I want him to be here with us, his memories and his irrepressible spirit pushing us forward. Even more so now, he will be. He is.