Yes, I grasped when the doctor assessed, “Your brother has the fastest growing cancer that we have identified to date.”\u00a0 I understand the word\u00a0 fast.\u00a0 And fastest.\u00a0 I am familiar with cancer around the edges of it.\u00a0 To take those cognitive grasps and turn them into experiences has been a roller coaster ride.<\/p>\n
Yesterday I tool a ride on Seattle’s largest Ferris Wheel.\u00a0 It motors you out over the\u00a0 Puget Sound.\u00a0 It gives the sense of being suspended with nothing really to hold to.\u00a0 My riding companion and I laughed with the attendant seated us and said, “Here’s the red button you push if you want to get out.”\u00a0 One platform.\u00a0 A whole huge rotation.\u00a0 WHERE you gonna go if you want to get out?\u00a0 I laughed a little too long.\u00a0 It was the tip off to my friend. “Eleanor Roosevelt suggests that you should do one thing every day that scares you.\u00a0 Today – this is my one thing.”<\/p>\n
But, that wasn’t entirely true.\u00a0 That my brother is thousands of miles away from me facing the journey to death’s door.\u00a0 And I’m not there. When I tell the un-re-framed truth, that scares me.\u00a0 He falls.\u00a0 He is still alone a lot.\u00a0 He burned up his microwave.\u00a0 These things don’t unsettle me. Disturb me. Concern me.\u00a0 They scare me.\u00a0 They scare me for him.\u00a0 That it won’t be the cancer that “gets him” but some unfortunate accident.\u00a0 That he could unintentionally bring harm to another.\u00a0 I was there for two weeks.\u00a0 He’s proud of that.\u00a0 He tells people in his 12-step group that I saw him when he “looked good and could do stuff.”\u00a0 He is\u00a0 glad I can’t see him now.<\/p>\n
I have faced dire circumstances myself.\u00a0 And it surprises me that I find\u00a0 courage and bravery more accessible on my own behalf. It’s harder to access, reach and hold on behalf of my brother.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So much, pretty much, 97% of “what I can do” has already been done.\u00a0 Now 100% of my job is to love him, call him and be available to the professional\u00a0 team that is in place to care for him.<\/p>\n
This is the way of process.\u00a0 Ease and confidence and certainty visit on a pendulum swing.\u00a0 And when the pendulum swings it swings to discomfort, being scare and uncertainty.<\/p>\n
My brother faces his own mortality with a television-style clock ticking in the upper corner of his daily view.\u00a0 And I face my profound awe at circumstances that are completely out of my control.\u00a0 I get to connect to that which I do govern: the clarity, the love, the support, the sharing of the journey.\u00a0 Doing what I can.\u00a0 Where I can.\u00a0 And yesterday I did that in four rotations\u00a0 of a giant Ferris Wheel to remind me that even the things that scare me have a landing point.\u00a0 There is a red button.\u00a0 There is a platform.\u00a0 And there is often a travel companion who will laugh and tell stories when they see the beads of sweat starting to form on your\u00a0 upper lip.<\/p>\n
So my brother’s friend helped him dressed.\u00a0 As he answered my call he told he’d already fallen once today, but he was okay.\u00a0 And he was getting ready to get a ride to his 12-step program.\u00a0 Which dependly reminds him that he lives as all of us live, one moment, one day at a time. So as I consider the real estate that grief is taking up in my daily life… it comes down to love, friends and a ferris wheel. One day at a time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yes, I grasped when the doctor assessed, “Your brother has the fastest growing cancer that we have identified to date.”\u00a0 I understand the word\u00a0 fast.\u00a0 And fastest.\u00a0 I am familiar with cancer around the edges of it.\u00a0 To take those cognitive grasps and turn them into experiences has been a roller coaster ride. Yesterday I…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[810,812,10,811],"class_list":["post-1713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-joys","tag-12-step","tag-cancer","tag-mary-anne-radmacher","tag-one-day-at-a-time"],"yoast_head":"\n