Dear Kindreds 2023--#2

Hello all!

Trying something today—

I have written morning pages for years now. I have yellow legal pad after yellow legal pad filled to the brim with tiny scrawled handwriting as I wrote everything that came to mind early in the morning. As per Julia Cameron (whose book you should read even though I STILL can’t remember the title—it’s one of the creative classics), it is a form of meditation. It is a way to unblock the creative flow. And it has served as that for me, for sure. I have had times I felt completely backwards, and writing three pages of Morning Pages in which I just let my mind free-flow, unfettered, unadulterated, unedited, made the all the difference in how I as seeing life.

I think I want to try doing it here, though, and posting it.

The idea came to me in meditation this morning. I want to post more consistently here as I was saying yesterday—building safety and all that—and I realized that the way to do that would be to significantly lower the barrier of entry. And what barrier of entry is lower than something I have already done daily for a really, really long time?

The key is to not think too hard about what I’m writing, and so that is what I’m doing now.

So, without further ado:

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MORNING PAGES

I just got a text from Dad saying that they got cells back from Maquel’s lungs and the cells were indeed malignant. So she has cancer.

My little sister has stage 4 cancer.

Those words are terrible to write. Terrifying. It feels wrong. It feels literally incorrect.

She went to the ER last week sometime because she was having trouble breathing. Everyone in the house (she lives with Dad and Laura (step-mom) currently) got sick a month or two ago with that weird hacking cough thing that’s been going around, except Kelli’s just… stayed. Eventually Laura encouraged her to get checked out, and the day she went in, she was advised to go the ER if things got worse. And that night, she was having real trouble breathing, and it wouldn’t let up no matter what position she was in. So she called it.

Dad took her in. They did an X-ray. When the technician saw it they said “wow, that looks icky.” That was the first indication something was very off.

They did a CT scan, which is so weird because only a month ago I also had a CT scan when I was in the hospital with my ulcers (have I talked about that here? Pretty sure I have not; it’s been a crazy month or two). What a strange procedure that is, where they give that liquid that shows up in the scan and warn you “you are going to feel like you peed your pants—it will be very warm—but I promise you haven’t.” And sure enough, it does feel like you pissed your pants, but you haven’t! Kelli remarked on this as well.

Apparently, when the doctor who reviewed the results came in, he said something along the lines of this. “There are two main things that I hate doing as a doctor. Telling someone their loved one has died, and telling someone they have cancer. Unfortunately, I have to tell you: you have cancer.”

They had found lesions in her lungs, as well as lesions in her liver. Her lymph nodes were inflamed. By all indications, it is stage IV cancer with unknown origin.

Stage IV. Right there. In her body.

I cannot.

When Dad called to tell me, Carlos and I were on a tiny vacation in Ocean Shores (trying to mend some brokenness between us—more on this another day when it doesn’t feel so fresh; we are doing much better.) I sat there as he told me and was speechless. I almost started breaking down sobbing, saying “hasn’t this girl been through fucking enough in this life? How is it possible there is more?”

But then I felt the old Weed Denial kick in.

Surely there is an error. Surely she is an exception. Dad said that it was 99% sure that it was cancer. Surely she is in the 1%. Surely.

I was numb the rest of the day, except for one terrible half hour where I lay on the bed as Carlos held me crying out to the Universe at the injustice inherent in this event, trying hard not to think of little Kelli as a girl—trying to avoid imagery that would make this real, make this potent, make this not-an-exception.

Today, five or so days later, dad just sent the text confirming part of what deep down we all really know to be true: the cells they sent to the lab from when they drained her lung (they drained a liter of fluid; Kelli says that she accidentally saw it, and that she was stunned when the fluid was black) are inconvertibly, truly, definitely, malignant.

This is cancer.

But denial still has a foothold, and likely will until the middle of next week when we get the results of the biopsy Kelli had today on her liver.

That will be the determination of the origin point of the cancer, which will tell us what stage it is. (It’s stage IV. We know this. Every doctor that has looked at the results and info from the scans has confirmed this including my uncle who is a surgeon, and who is the one that got Kelli in today in his hospital in Coos Bay, OR to get the biopsy done since the hospital in Portland was going to make her wait until the goddam eleventh. And yet my brain refuses to fully accept this until I see in black and white on a text message, definitively.)

Denial’s a bitch.

It’s also a survival mechanism that is allowing me to deal with the many crises that seem to have converged into one two-month span of time, and so god bless denial, I guess.

Every once in a while, a moment occurs where the pain seeps up and the reality of this situation leaks out everywhere including my eyeballs, like when I told Lolly and watched her go through the stages of grief right before my eyes (via text, but still) yelling in anger and weeping for Kelli. Or like this morning when I was leaving a voice message for her and I somehow tapped into the gift of mediumship I and all my family possess and I started speaking some really powerful truths about this situation while weeping profusely. Things I no longer remember, and that I was crestfallen to discover tonight were lost because I forgot to press fucking SEND on the message as I was picked up to go to a meeting (damn you ADHD) and so the message was erased.

Besides those moments, I feel right as rain.

Right as rain falling lightly on a summer day, where the dark looming clouds of a giant storm churn and roil blackly in the distant, moving quickly with the wind, and I can feel sweeps of cold air and can smell the scent of storm water on pavement, and can feel the electric charge of the oncoming cloudburst, which I know will soon be upon me.

But for now, I feel the pitter patter, and I tell myself again and again that surely there will be no storm, and surely I will not get drenched, and surely these dark clouds will soon disperse and things will go back to normal, and everything is going to be just so very, very fine.

*whistles as he walks naively towards the looming darkness*
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This was a great exercise. Can’t promise the content will be quite so dramatic (sometimes my morning pages are very navel gazey boring, but it bodes well to me that this was so easy to do.

Now, without editing at all, I press publish, thus confirming to my adorable little brain that this is easy to do, and not scary, and so, so, simple and seamless and very much a thing-I-can-do-every-single-day-if-I-want-to-without-a-hitch.

Love to you all, my dear Kindreds. Thanks for following along.

Joshua