I used to believe that there was a formula—
…step on a crack, break your mother’s back
I thought that if even against my better judgement or despite my best efforts, if I indeed stepped on a crack that I could avoid the next seven and take it back.
Take it back. Take back Dawn dying, take back Ransom dying, take back Susan getting sick again, take back her dying.
The thing is, there is no forumla. Angie, toughest person I ever met got sick. Dawn, sweetest woman I ever knew, no do-over. I want to buck and rail and rant ’til spittle flies from my mouth and my face is as red as the smarting hurt upon my heart. I want to bandy the #fuckcancer hashtag about and have it make a difference. I want to think about the law of equals and know that someone who deserves it more will be the one.
That wish haunts me, because there is always someone loving someone, always someone gazing up at ballons with the whole of their being and watching dreams and futures float away against their control. This year has brought the revelations that it doesn’t matter how hard you work, how fearlessly you love, or even how honestly you live—cancer, misfortune, and their cousins are indiscriminate.
This would break me if I didn’t know how enduring the glow of Ransom’s face was, or how profoundly Dawn’s pure spirit touched the people she graced with her wisdom, her smile, and her relentless support and positivity. I am deeply impacted by how short both their lives were cut, and I say this next part with trepidation, I am not Ransom’s mother and Dawn is not my mom. I never lived with or for either, but make no mistake, I did love them both. They are gone and there will be no more comments from Dawn, no more pictures of Ransom, but as sure as they were in my life a week and a half and ago, they are still here.
They are here with all of us. Cancer took them, but in completing their battles with cancer, they stopped suffering. Our vigils ended and our lives changed, but because of each of them, we will move through our days differently. We will check our skin, we will live boldly. We will remember having them and losing them, and will continue on remembering them.
I want to be so angry, and to a certain degree I am, but as I understand how loss is not something that we can control, I am grateful. I am grateful for the years of Dawn talking to me. Sometimes she agreed with me, sometimes I made her scratch her head (sometimes I made her crazy with how I made her cry, but I think deep down she liked it), and other times she said that she saw it a different way—each time I was grateful that she had taken the time. That was so much of it, she took the time. Cancer can’t take that away.
Cancer can’t erase Ransom’s smile and it can’t ever hope to diminish the impact Dawn had in so many lives.
I will mourn, we all will, but the pound within the many cancer hashtags have a new push, it is the force of wanting to remember Ransom and Dawn and Susan and so many others. We hear you knocking cancer, and we are going to be knocking back.
We’ll fight.
We’ll check our skin.
We’ll watch the signals.
We will find a way to beat you and along the way we will cherish all the lives.
To quote Dawn:
I’ve begun dancing and singing loudly with the boys…heck, without the boys!
Yesterday, Matt was talking about playing flag football in the spring and was assuming I wouldn’t play…I pretty much shocked him by saying that I would totally play flag football. It was a total ‘your mom rocks, you’d better watch out’ moment.
Tagged: grief
amanda,
beautiful, moving tribute. i am so sorry for your losses. i carry you in my heart. thank you for sharing this. i love the quote from Dawn at the end.
thank you for this today….
xoxo
Thank you, friend.
Hi, Amanda.
I’m visiting your blog for the first time, after Erin shared this post with me. I am sorry for your losses, but glad that you chose to write about them here. I was particularly moved by the paragraph that begins ‘They are here with all of us.’
My thoughts are with you. I am very pleased to meet you today.
Take care,
Casey
Casey, I am so often grateful for Erin. Thank you for coming here, for reading these words, and honoring my friends and the difference that they made.
It is my pleasure, Amanda. I am always pleased to read of others’ friendships and the joy that was shared, and continues to be shared by the simple fact of having known wonderful people.
“I want to buck and rail and rant ’til spittle flies from my mouth and my face is as red as the smarting hurt upon my heart.”
Yes, so much this. It’s overwhelming, the rage that accompanies the engulfing sobs. Right up until Mike’s tweet, I felt like a petulant child, refusing to believe – hell, I STILL don’t want to believe. Life is just so unfair sometimes, and there are no easy answers or explanations.
xoxo
The way he described how she chose not to get angry or sad because it wouldn’t change things…she will never stop showing us how to be abetter, calmer, happier people. xo
I had fear and belief that the worst would happen–if the worst is death, but not until very late. Even in the hospital, even through exploratory surgery I believed someone would figure this crap out and fix Dawn and then we’d laugh at her tweets about her terrible hospital roommates and holy run-on sentence, life would march on. I believed until 9 days ago when she tweeted the last tweet I ever received from her that as sure as I heard from her, she was here. I feverishly insisted to Mike that I just wanted her to know how many people loved her and were holding her up. But, she’s gone, and free of pain now. She’s left a huge hole like all of our other friends who have made exits from our lives far too soon. But we’ve learned something. We’ve surely learned something.
I shared your disbelief…incredulity? The not acceptableness, let alone believable. And then, gone. And yet, so much of her, the gentle but strong happiness she had, I still feel it.
I had fear and belief that the worst would happen–if the worst is death, but not until very late. Even in the hospital, even through exploratory surgery I believed someone would figure this crap out and fix Dawn and then we’d laugh at her tweets about her terrible hospital roommates and holy run-on sentence, life would march on. I believed until 9 days ago when she tweeted the last tweet I ever received from her that as sure as I heard from her, she was here. I feverishly insisted to Mike that I just wanted her to know how many people loved her and were holding her up. But, she’s gone, and free of pain now. She’s left a huge hole like all of our other friends who have made exits from our lives far too soon. But we’ve learned something. We’ve surely learned something.
“…loss is not something that we can control” So true, and finding the gratefulness in the loss is such a graceful way to live through it.
Thank you for this post.
And thank you for reading it, for remembering and for sharing the loss.
I celebrate her, and life itself, because that is what she would want. But I am still so sad.