Yesterday, I flew home. (For a little while.) After some messing about with household logistics, I spent a lovely evening with Jersey Girl in Portland, who is delightfully supportive of my little ongoing healthcare contretemps.. A busy social calendar today carries me through this evening, before I land back at the house again finally. Tomorrow and Tuesday aren't really much lighter. Then I hurtle off to Chicago on Wednesday, followed immediately by Baltimore; keeping me away from Nuevo Rancho Lake for ten days.

Staying engaged and horribly busy serves two purposes right now:

First, it keeps me busy in the moment. This really isn't a good time for quiet reflection. I'll have months of that stretching ahead of me. I know my own mind regarding my cancer, the_child, my social and emotional and physical relationships. At this point, reflectivity just lets all the howling little demons of anger and bitterness and grief out of their cages. This isn't denial, it's self-management.

Secondly, I'm gobbling up experiences like a pauper at the king's table. People, places, food. What ever I can find. Eat All the Things. Kiss All the Girls. And so forth. Soon enough, I'll be living on not much more than body-ravaging pharmaceuticals and memories. So again, not denial, but self-management.

I am very afraid of what the return of this disease will do to my family and my friends and my loved ones. the_child's teen years are being inexorably bent around the anvil of my illness in a way I would give anything to stop. I know from bitter experience what the emotional and cognitive distortions of chemotherapy can do to the relationships of my heart. And I can see the hollow reflection of my death in the eyes of my parents, of my siblings, of Mother of the Child.

So for now, I live a little harder, and spend a little less time with those shadows than perforce I will in the long, slow, dreadful months to come.