Being Strong When You're Not Really

"Keep your chin up!" "Best foot forward!" "Be strong for your sister and your family!" All advice offered by a friend who feels she has been through the mill in life (she has, by the way) and offered with the impatience of someone who does not readily cry or, as she puts it, does not wear her heart on her sleeve. All very much opposite the temperament of the friend to whom she is speaking.

As mentioned before in my blog, my younger sister has had a relapse in her battles with leukemia and is going back into the hospital for further treatment and a bone marrow transplant. She does not need people being weepy and depressed around her as she prepares for the next stage in her fight so I, being more of the weepy type, am trying to get it all out of my system before I visit her this afternoon. Nothing could induce me to deliberately try to undermine Patty's focus or determination but, if my eyes leak without my consent in her presence, that may be how she feels although it will be so far from the truth of the matter as to make the negative interpretations almost cruel without that being the actual motive behind her response to the tears, either.

Her response to people being weepy is defensive. I think it makes her feel like they are grieving prematurely and she has no intention of obliging them by sickening and dying before she is ready to and the tears, though not so much for fear of her imminent demise (and certainly not because of a wish for that to happen!), being more because life is so unfair and that my sister should not be having to deal with this "thing," this disease I wish I could snuff out completely and have Patty healthy, happy, and fiesty again; those are the tears and why they exist and sneak out at inopportune moments.

So, I am going to buy her some balloons (mylar and not latex) and use them to hide the tears as I visit and take her funny movies to watch and, hopefully, help keep her spirits up, which can be hard for her when she is in the midst of chemotherapy treatments that make her sicker than she has ever been before in her life. She is also going to lose what little hair has had time to grow during the brief span of time that since the last treatments has granted her.

I will be trying not to recall moments from our mutual childhoods that may lead in the direction of grief, however unintentionally; those thoughts and memories can wait, hopefully for times we may get to spend looking through photographs for her kids' photo and memory albums as they each prepare for happy moments in their own lives: weddings, graduations, babies, and such. Maybe even for the time when, both of us old, gray and wrinkled beyond belief are sitting watching Patty's grandchildren drive their parents up a tree; then we can do these memories and reminisce, when we are that old together. That is when the tears will somehow be OK, although Patty, not being the weepy type, may still give me a "Good grief, Elizabeth!" sort of look just like our Mom used to now and then. In my imagination I picture Patty with more wrinkles than I will have then, a weaker older sister's final revenge.