Rest

So, I have taken to crying myself to sleep this week. I power up the air conditioner, get into bed, pull the covers around me and on my way into the great slumber, images of Chris and his struggle invade my thoughts causing and eruption of gut-wrenching tears of defeat.

I have become aware and accustomed to this sort of pattern. This behavior usually follows each time I “push the envelope” and face a fear.

Traveling to Vermont has been a fear of mine for the past year and a half. I drove the drive that Chris drove. I lived the weekend he would have lived, laughing with the friends he had laughed with hundreds of times. I popped myself into the hole he left and it did not feel right. I felt like I was living his life with his friends, betraying him by going to Vermont in the first place after he clearly expressed his desire to keep Vermont and the Vermonters to himself. I really did understand that and I accommodated his wish and I know he appreciated the respect and grew to trust that it would always be there. It always would have been. I would never have broken my word to him.

But I need those guys in my life. I love that they loved him. He loved them, too. We are connected to each other through Chris and I’m glad for that. A bond formed through our ordeal and I am grateful to be included in their world. I still fall short of being able to call them “my” friends, though. They’re Chris’ friends. They always will be and I can’t step into his mold. I won’t step into his mold. Nobody ever can.

Yesterday, I looked up photos of desmoplastic small round cell tumors online and found a picture of an operation in progress. the doctors had just removed 80% of one from a young boy and the large mass was sitting in a tray on the operating room table. All in all, the offensive mound, hardly a deadly sight, did not look much different from any of the red meats that might be seen in the supermarket meat department case. I stared at that tumor for a couple of minutes and thought, “So that’s the piece of shit that killed my Chris.” Cancer is an evil, evil disease, the tumor belonging to everybody who loves the victim. Somebody has to host the tumor, but its tentacles stretch to attach to the hearts and souls of the victim’s loved ones, inflicting death within the host and the pain of death within everybody in its vicinity. The damage does not end there, though, because even the people who love the people who are affected by the victim’s pain are affected in a demonic ripple effect.

Pain is the name of the game. The pieces are struggle, terror and heartbreak and if the players live long enough to “buy the farm” they have fulfilled their contract with life.

I plan to buy the farm, do some remodeling and invite everybody in to share it with me and when I finally arrive before the white light, I know Chris and I will be smiling at each other the way old friends do and we will thank each other for the life experience and the lessons we learned. Then we will join hands and walk in together, enveloped in the love I am sure we have felt throughout many ages.

There we will rest for a while before our next lives.