You never know how strong you are until being strong is your only choice

It's been 20 days since I found out (secondhand) that my mom was in the hospital. 18 days since she called and told me that she had decided to stop cancer treatment and enter hospice care, and I drove from New York to Charlottesville as fast as I could. 12 days since I drove to West Virginia to pick up her stuff. 10 days since my partner and sister-in-law drove her to Pennsylvania. 5 days since we got her into her own apartment. 1 day since I flew back to New York and slept in my own bed for the first time in three weeks.

In the past three weeks, I have slept in seven beds in four states. I have gone without sleep longer than I have since college, when I did it for significantly more fun reasons. I have moved uncountable items from car to car to house to house across all those statelines. I have decorated the apartment my mother will die in. And I've done all this while trying to wrap my head around that fact.

This is not a complete list. I haven't been blogging during this time but I have been keeping a pretty religious journal, and at some point I'll actually go through it and be shocked at all the things that happened that I barely even remember doing.

Grieving someone who's still alive is a strange and difficult process. I guess I expected when I first had to deal with this there would be an adult in the room to help me. But all my mom really has is me, my brother, and our partners. We had to be the adults in the room. You don't get time to process. There are countless doctors and hospice nurses and bureaucrats and forms to fill out and people to call and things to get in order. We're only really now hitting the part where the main thing we have to do is caregiving, where we'll have to deal with the day-to-day of watching someone we love slowly go away. Don't get me wrong, we've been keeping her fed and watered and making sure someone's with her around the clock, it just took two weeks for that to be the main thing we were doing instead of also trying to move an entire life into a new place while we did it. And now we get to the slow part. I don't know if we have days, or weeks, or months. A lot of it depends on my mom.

She told me that we saved her life. When I first got to the hospital, they thought she might only have days to live. Three weeks on and she's still kicking, talking, and alert. She can't do a lot for herself but at least she's still there mentally.

I don't think it's supposed to be quite as difficult as this has been. But regardless we did it. I guess I'm writing this accounting in part so I don't forget that. Every one of us taking care of my mom has needed some time or broken down during this but for the most part we all just got up and did what needed doing. We're all capable of a lot more than we probably thought we were.

I feel almost bulletproof. Nothing that stresses me out in my day-to-day life can come close to the last few weeks. A lot of people have told me that times of crisis show you who you really are, and who the people around you are, and so far I've been pretty fucking impressed.

I am, hypothetically, taking a bit of time to be back in my own home and tie up the loose ends I left in a hurry 18 days ago. But who knows if I'll get a call tomorrow and find out I have to fly back. I'll deal with it as it comes.

In the meantime, since I have time on my hands, I'm going to try to start writing again. I'm not committing to picking up my hundred days again because come on man have you read this fucking thing that would be insane but at least for the few days I have where I'm not in the eye of the hurricane I might as well try and make something.