Today is the last day of our Spring Break. As usual, I spent the week doing absolutely nothing, which I loved, then waking up today totally regretting having done nothing. If you rewind a couple of months to Thanksgiving and Christmas, well, this would have been the same song and dance.
Wake up. Do nothing. Go to bed. Repeat.
This schedule works for a hermit living in a Hobbit hole on some rocky, emerald mountain next to the sea who has no family or home to take care of and the only thing on their to-do list for the day is to drink copious amounts of hot coffee while watching the fog roll in and ponder about life's great mysteries.
Oh, to be a Hobbit.
The more I think about it, I guess even Bilbo Baggins wasn't content living in the Shire. Why leave the safety of your home and pursue adventure if not for boredom on some subconscious level?
But I'm not bored: I'm just exhausted.
I sat on my porch, soaking in the last quiet morning of doing nothing, and I watched the fog in the field across from me. It tip-toed in a gray flamenco dress, whooshing by me, and before I even realized it was around me, it was too far away for me to reach out my hand and ask it to dance.
I thought about how we always say we're "in a fog" about things when we're too tired or too worried to make any sense of anything. That everything is gray and heavy and everywhere. That has been my last four years.
It is hard to sit back and think about that insidious cancer growing in Dad's lung, much like the fog, quiet and creeping until it is so far out in front of you that you cannot touch it. You must hope in the white-hot heat of chemotherapy to dissolve each and every cell into oblivion. And even then, it comes back.
Thicker, grayer, heavier.
Dad has discussed with us that he knows he will have to continue to do the chemotherapy for as long as he can tolerate and for as long as the current cocktail is working. He still has numerous (last check in January revealed at least eight) lesions on his liver, and thankfully, his latest PET scans haven't revealed any more. Cancer is smart: mutating with each new chemotherapy and becoming an elusive assassin with every treatment so that it cannot be eradicated, which means this current dosage won't be the last. If you want to get technical, Dad is considered to be getting palliative care, knowing full and well that there is no chance for a cure, only a mixture of medicine meant to keep the cancer at bay.
This is the fog that will never lift.
