Not Celebrating

My brain is buzzing. Can I even hold in the same breath my friend’s multiple myeloma and my son’s engagement? I am zigzagging among the weeds or the bulrushes or the fields of bright dahlias.  I wish the field of multi colored blooms was still available in Pescadero. The field of many years ago. Pick your own. Create a bouquet. Pay as you leave. Take your time. Dive right in and wander.

This morning I brought him a plate of toast. Mild cheese and a banana reminiscent of his childhood in Australia. He explained that when the fruit got brown his mother cut slices into a glass or cup or bowl of milk. And sprinkled this treat with sugar. “ We loved it…because it was sweet.” He was more animated than I had seen him in days. Crouching on his hospital bed in his private room on 11 Long. The quiet floor for blood and lots of IVs. He is getting a stem cell transplant.

The stem cells go out and then - as I will now explain without the benefit of any medical expertise - they are cleaned and then they are returned. With, hopefully, a theater full of healthy white cells. The ones that do battle with the evil cancer ones. He stayed with us during the outpatient procedure of removing the cells. And then storing them into test tubes carefully labeled I imagine. I never saw them. But I picture them, perhaps a rainbow of colors, maybe glistening, but probably just a standard red.

 Once the test tubes were full, he returned two weeks ago to remain an inpatient while a mega dose of chemotherapy ripped into his immune system. To leave him like a newborn with no immunity. No memory of a childhood case of the measles or a bout with strep throat. Years of flu shots and more recently the Covid vaccines were wiped from his body’s memory. Weak and tired and nauseous he remains in the hospital still, but hopefully to go home on Tuesday. Each day stronger, more able to walk the halls and chat for a few minutes with visitors who are encouraged.

Robert and I have visited. Me more recently as Robert’s cold is not allowed on the sterilized floor full of masks. It‘s ok. I want to be there, perhaps as much because his wife, my dear friend, passed just before the shutdown. Her cancer having returned after many years. She was angry and depressed and though we all did what we could, she perhaps preferred to retreat as of course entitled. So now I am present for him, as much because of  my affection for him and his family, but perhaps also in Sandra’s memory. Finally I can help.

I twirl among these cancer memories and the news of my son’s engagement. This truly is the thing to celebrate. I knew it was coming, he and Dasha are on year #6, but the reality is still slowly melting into my frontal lobe. Today, after toast and cheese delivered to the hospital on Parnassus, we chatted about the engagement party Robert and I will host later in April.

The thing is…the details aren’t important and explaining is not necessary. Suffice it to say that there was more twirling here. About the food, and the guest list and whose party is it anyway?? A bit of mother/son anxiety which passed. We care so much about each other, that sometimes I dive into the past and forget that he is 30 and sane and fully capable even when anxiety surfaces.

I am celebrating the marriage of these two ….the son whom I will always love to the moon and back, and the lovely Dasha whose golden hair and crystal blue eyes must mean she surely is a star who discovered Nico in her travels through the extraterrestial. First there was darkness and now there is light.

I am not celebrating my friend’s cancer. But perhaps the hoped-for recovery. The miracles of medicine which could not save his wife,  but will hopefully  program many more years for him. So he can join us for a cappuccino when we visit him in Nevada City. Or as we  hike along the Yuba River. Or for the mandatory foray into that fabulous kitchen store in Grass Valley where we each bought the most perfect, hand held pepper grinder. We will sit in his backyard hot tub after walking back and forth over the swinging bridge.

To care so deeply for my son and for my friend all at once, in the same day, the same morning. To know that I cannot control the health of my friend’s cells or my son’s emotional landscape. I can only control my attitude and my own side of the street. I cannot control the outcome of the Super Bowl and which exits will be blocked as I return to San Francisco and the small slice of life that I call mine.