Writing

Apparently I write extremely good cancer updates. I do not think that is a skill to which one should aspire.

Is that all I want to say about that? Maybe. But my dad told me yesterday that I should save my letters because maybe in ten years or so I'd want to write a book, and my reaction was almost revulsion. I do want to write a book -- I want to write lots of books. Fun books. Happy-ever-after ending books. Cheerful, silly, quirky, romantic books. Not books about dying.

And then my aunt said in an email that I should save my emails because they'd be helpful to someone else going through this. That...well, that I would want to do, if I knew how. This is really hard and if I could find something that made it better, yeah, that'd be good. But really, I'm not sure people head to the bookstores to find books about trying to figure out how to say good-bye. I don't know that for a fact, but I'm a compulsive reader and it never even occurred to me. It'd be a good skill to have, though.

Yesterday, Mom entered "terminal restlessness." Apparently she actually even punched a nurse, which I just find really hard to imagine. When I was with her, she steadily tried to stand, trying to get up and move around. She's so frail now that that's impossible, but she really wanted it. I kept telling her that her spirit wanted to move, not her body, and that her body wasn't up for it, and she would calm back down. Once she said, frantically, "Let me go, let me go," and I said, "You can go whenever you want, Mom, but you can't bring your body with you, you have to let it go," and she sort of nodded and then dozed off again. But then the nurse's aide came in and hung out in the room and I was too inhibited to be my weirdly spiritual self, which was probably sort of a pity. Still, the general skills I learned from having a toddler -- acknowledge the feeling, re-state the rule -- worked just fine.

I'll spend the night at the hospice again tomorrow. Really, I'm happier when I'm there, so that's okay. Although in funnier writing news, every time I come home I write an extremely short, M-rated, Eureka story. I don't even intend to, my fingers just type it out on their own. One of them I had to read ten times after I was done because a) it's awesome and b) I wrote it??? It doesn't sound like me, and I don't even remember thinking up some of the lines. I think it just wrote itself. It's really good, though (or at least I think so!)