Yearlong Song Challenge, Day 127: Nate

Prompt: "The song you sang along to during a pivotal moment in your life"

Selected by Nate

"in the knees"

long odds

fine thread, 2022

It's been just about two years since I moved back to Rochester. When I talk to people about the move—which happens a lot less frequently now and when it does I've sanded down the talking points enough to get the pitch to a tight five—I always frame it as "I moved my family to be closer to family," which is only a little bit of the truth. I didn't move my family; my wife suggested that we consider moving and we talked about it, and I suggested that if we were going to make the move we had to do it now, which we discussed and she agreed to. We moved together, together, even if it doesn't always feel that way, even if people don't really believe it when I say it, even if it's a projection and a perspective I hold to make myself feel safe.

And the other thing. We did move to be closer to family but really we moved to be closer to my mother who was diagnosed with aggressive, comprehensive stage four cancer. I can remember the phone call if I let myself; in the basement, at my glorified table that I used as a desk, during the workday, sitting in my office chair, one hand on my head and the other holding my phone as my parents talked to me on speakerphone about what the scans found and what the timeline looked like on average for people like her with conditions like hers. I can't recall the words but I can recall the sounds. I can't recall the weather but I can recall the feeling; like my eyes were too big for my head, like they were going to press and fall out of my head onto the floor. Like I hadn't slept in weeks. Like I needed a beer or a candy bar or fifteen beers or fifteen candy bars, like I needed to run out and get in the car and drive home, like I needed to run upstairs and hug my kids. Eighteen months, give or take. Some people longer, some people shorter, but eighteen months was what to expect, what felt safe to assume. She said she was going to keep living her life the way she wanted to until she couldn't, and then we'd figure it out from there.

I've written about this idea before somewhere—probably on this blog if not my other haunted house—and I think that, if I could go full Didion and do the research into grief and its expression, I'd find this isn't an original thought at all, but grief, for me, is expressed like a bell. Maybe not a bell, but like sonar or echolocation. It radiates out from the center of the mind in a ring of light, and it reflects off of memories of grief's past and bounces back to the center, making the feeling one long recurring sadness in which every new tragedy becomes part of a tapestry of loss and suffering. My mother's cancer reminded me of my cousin drinking himself to death, of my grandmother dying of a stroke, of my friend jumping in front of a train, of my grandmother dying of old age. All those hurts sang in harmony in my mind in the hours after that phone call. The impending loss of my mother was Diana Ross, all the other losses sang backup. I'm still there, part of me is, in that basement with an ancient heater and a cracked concrete floor and un-topped boxes of clothes and children's toys, holding a hand to my head and hand on a phone, waiting for the end to come.

Thing is, it hasn't. We've been here for two years. 24 months. 28 months if you count the distance between that first phone call and this blog post now. Between a surgery that basically scraped my mother out from the inside and bathed her body in radiation, a chemo cycle that slowed but did not stop the growth of cancer, and a clinical trial that has, miraculously, not only stopped the growth but shrunk it in some spots, my mother is still with us. She was at my house yesterday for my second daughter's third birthday. She's got the girls at her house now. She was at the beach with us earlier in the month. She was at the Fourth of July celebration in the Adirondacks in July. She came over to babysit while I went to a concert in April. She picked my oldest up from school on her first day of kindergarten. She's upright, she's moving, she's lively, she's warm, she's involved. My youngest, just about eighteen months old now, can say her name. My oldest daughter will have memories of her, and its looking more and more like my middle will, too. No one is getting ahead of their skis, no one dare believe that what's out there can be reversed. But I dared not hope that this is where we'd be two years into this move, into this reconfiguration of five lives. Everyone eventually becomes a memory, and eventually my mother will too and I'll have to figure out where the feelings go. But for now, she's here and we are too, and I cannot believe how lucky we are. Time is all you get. I love you, mom.