Burning Candle

My life has been swirling for 17 months.

My husband and I, to borrow a cliché, are like two ships passing in the night. Month after month he travels, then I travel, then he travels, then I travel. Until recently, that is, when my body started to give out and I had to transition to every-other-month trips, which really hurts my soul but I seemingly have no choice.

We’re not traveling for fun (what’s a vacation?), and not for work (although sometimes this happens too, and further complicates our schedules). But we’re traveling to see our sick parents. Our parents who got sick within 2-3 weeks of each other last spring. One diagnosis was pretty straightforward: cancer, stage 2; surgery, chemo, and radiation to follow. The other? Elusive. My dad’s sudden inability to walk, to talk, to use his hands, to eat, to see, to do anything…with no identifiable cause. No answers from literally the best doctors in the world (Mayo Clinic), and therefore no effective treatment…and we’re about out of options.

In those same 17 months, we have uprooted our lives twice. This was an attempt to problem-solve, where we abruptly left our home in Connecticut and plopped into a noisy, shoddy, miserable high rise in New Jersey that got us closer to an airport.

Then two months later, after being smoked out by neighbors multiple times a day/night and also suffering through 8-10 hours of building shaking from pile driving every single day, we uprooted again. Dart, thrown. Sort of. We just picked what was available, in a random town we’d never heard of, because there weren’t any other viable options at the time.

So here we are alone in New Jersey, missing our Connecticut life, cursing at the crappy weather (it’s windy here) and the noise (the trains blare their horns 24/7 as they pass by), and also bemoaning our “more accessible” airport (Newark) that has been failing and results in serious delays every single trip. And I’m feeling like…uggggggghhhhh.

What is this all for? Why is this happening and when will it stop?

Much to our dismay, the stage 2 cancer reappeared unexpectedly last month as an aggressive stage 4. The elusive diagnosis for my dad is still elusive, and none of the dozens of treatments they’ve tried have worked (“sorry, we still can’t find a cause”). I spend every day wondering if I’ll get to see him again, and I’m sure my husband has started wondering the same about his mom.

Anyway.

I don’t know what the point of this writing is except maybe to get it out of my energy field instead of continuing to spin internally and numb myself via screens. I mean, I’ll probably go do that in a few. But my soul is aching. And I can’t tell what, exactly, is causing the ache anymore. Maybe everything?

I sat with myself for a while last night to try to figure it out – partly because some rude humans were launching fireworks into the air until the wee hours, but partly because I’m just bone tired and I don’t know how to overcome it anymore. What is it?…I asked myself. Aside from the obvious, is there some other problem in my life?

The only thing I could come up with (so far) is that what I’m doing in my off hours isn’t serving me. Meaning the activities I’m choosing to do in an attempt to cope with the barrage of bad health news, the repetitive separations from my husband, and my utter dislike of our New Jersey location. The stuff like mindless scrolling and tv watching.

My off hours used to be spent strolling along the shore or under the trees, or taking a quick trip to the city to wander the streets, or working on my watercolor painting. I now just sit here and stare a lot. I don’t engage in anything meaningful because my life does not currently feel meaningful, and we’ve lost access to so many of the things that are important to my mental and spiritual health…trees, big city activities, shoreline, ospreys, eagles. We’ve even lost access to our favorite restaurants and have struggled to find places here that we like.

I feel like I’m burning the candle at both ends, so to speak, where my work life is on one side and my personal life is on the other, and both wicks are burning at max intensity. There has been no break. No rest. So the flames are getting closer and closer together now, where I imagine they will swirl into a ball of fire and explode. And then I’ll be in real trouble.

But I digress.

Frustrating NJ living situation aside, I just wish the sickness would stop. I wish the travel would stop. I wish I could spend a full month with my husband, without one of us having to leave. In about six days it’s my turn to go again, and then I’ll come back and two days later the hubby has to go, which means we’ll barely see each other for two weeks.

I miss him. I miss our life we were trying to build. I miss not having to worry about sick parents, and if someone is going to die this month. I’m just so…tired.