Saturday, June 9, 2012

So Far Away

Tonight I picked up some food at our favorite pizza and pasta takeout joint. While I was waiting, I couldn’t help but smile at two young girls, clearly friends and not sisters, probably eight or nine years old, sitting alone in their own booth (but right next to their parents’ booth, of course), just cracking up hysterically at who knows what. They would grow quiet and put their heads together and then burst into uproarious laughter and fall all over each other. I remember those days with my little girlfriends so well, even now, well over twenty-five years on.
 
Hudson will never have that. I will never have to lean my head over a booth and tell her and her friend to pipe down just a touch. I will never get to wonder just what she and that friend might be whispering about—boys already? Or just someone funny they saw walking by? I will never get to feel that motherly pride of being let in on the secret at some point or another, knowing that she trusts me enough to tell me something special.

I have been thinking a lot lately about how she seems so very far away from me these days. We live in a town and a house that was never her home, although she visited here from time to time. I wear my hair in a cut she never saw me with. We take walks on routes she never knew. Her little brother grows older and bigger each day, and soon I will no longer have the opportunity to mention her at almost every breath, because he will be older than she ever was and I will no longer have her as a point of comparison. I spend far too much mental energy thinking about cancer, wondering how much longer I will have to be in treatment, how it will affect my life, whether I will really be cured, how I will manage for the rest of my life the fear of the cancer returning. There is too much white noise. I feel like I am missing the essence of it all somehow.

I want more time. I want more time with her. I want more time for her. I want her. I want her.

7 comments:

  1. It's a strange thing, to want to hold on but to have to let go. Our Diana would have been 29 a week from today had meningitis not claimed her life at 11 months. Yet I can't imagine life without her younger brother Drew, who mightn't have been born otherwise, and about my own life since which might have been very different. It's not what I planned, but it is the way it is.

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  2. Oh, Mandy, I find myself noticing the distance and we are in the same house we lived in with him. It's like time is space. Sometimes the only thing that brings me close is something really hard and awful, some sensory or emotional trigger that brings me back to the horror of the hospital, but sometimes in that I get the full sense of a smile or the intensity of love and hope. I don't know if that changes, that distance, if it gets better or different or circles back somehow, but I know it is another layer of hard. Hugs and strength and healing to you.

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  3. i saw a book and thought of you .it is titled, 'someone came before you'it is available on amazon.i think you would like the way it speaks . jackson might love it.i think of you often and pop over here always to see how you are feeling. keelys friend babz.

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  4. I know you do Mandy. Sending lots of love x

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  5. Of course you want her. I'm so sorry. How badly I wish I could just FIX IT.
    XO
    Claire

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  6. Oh Mandy. I do so wish that I could give your Hudson more time. I can almost see her animated little face, grown and gigging with her friends. I wish she could have had that. I wish you could have seen her do that.

    I agree with Sara. I live in the same house, I've lived in the same town all my life and it is like time is space. I feel her growing more distant although I have changed nothing at all about my life.

    I'm sorry that you feel you are missing the essence of it all. There is just SO much to take in and think about and wonder about. Thinking of you and always remembering beautiful Hudson x

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  7. Mandy,

    This is the moment when the internet isn't enough. A big hug is what should follow the sharing of your thoughts.

    We love you oh so much.
    Candy & Daz

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