Denial

I realized recently that I have been living in denial. I have always been slow to deal with issues in my life. I am the type of person who doesn't deal with an event until it has happened. For instance, say I move. For some reason, none of the feeling of absence and longing for others hits me until I leave. I never find myself saying, man I am going to miss this place or these people until they after I am gone. I know this is not necessarily a bad thing because it allows me to live in the moment and enjoy life as it happens. However it also can force me to struggle with an issue because I do not always foresee being beyond it or the end results.
This has made dealing with my mother's cancer extremely difficult. Also the nature and obscurity of carcinoid has permitted me to live this way. No one really knows what is happening or what may happen. All anyone knows is it is a slow developing, incurable endocrine cancer. For me, this boils down to a prognosis of we can't tell you when carcinoid will kill you and how it will, but, at some time, it will kill you.
As I said, it takes me a while to deal with issues, but honestly it takes me a long time to really do anything, like sort my life out and figure out what I want to do with it. For some people, this comes naturally, for some others it never comes, for me it came, went, and seems to be coming back again. And right as it is happening, one of the people who I want to witness it most may not be there to see it.
People are always amazed by mother. No one, it seems can grasp how a 5'5, 100 lbs woman would produce and raise 10 children of which 8 are boys all over 6ft. They see her and think she must posses this supernatural strength and drive in order to have kept them all fed, clothed and organized. but no one ever considers the real strength she possesses: her ability to intimately know and experience the pains and joys of all ten of her children. My mother's life has been her children, when we have struggled and suffered, she has. And when we have succeeded and felt the joys of life, she too has felt a measure of these.
Right now, I find myself beginning to take hold of my lifelong dream. A dream that I know my mother too has always hoped for me to live, not because she selfishly desires this, but because she knows it is what I deeply desire and always have.
She is battling with cancer and I cannot seem to deal with this. Part of my brain understands that my mother isn't going to be around as long as I once thought, but an even bigger part does not want to believe this.
I live 3 miles from school. I am not patient enough to walk and I am too cheap to take public transportation, so I bike. Each day, I ride to school regardless of the weather. Sometimes, I can just let my mind wander and enjoy the ride, but more often than not I find myself focusing on what I have to do that day, or, in the case of biking home, what I did that day and what I will do tomorrow. I tend to find that I cannot have these thoughts without thinking about my mother. I look to the future and see a world in which she is not there to hear about my day and the days to come. She is not there to share in my successes and to comfort me in my failures. I find the tears welling up and so I push myself. I peddle harder and harder so that I can think of nothing else but the exhaustion in my legs .
I recently shared this with someone who told me that maybe this is my way of dealing with the disease. Maybe it is a my way of beginning to let go. Yet I feel this cannot be the only solution. I must move beyond this. A life of denial is no life and it's certainly not what I want.