A huge thank you to everyone who reached out to me and let me know they had donated blood (or are going to), in honor of Kendall. I felt privileged to be able to be included in that group. In retrospect, perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised at how emotional donating blood ended up being for me. (Yes, I totally cried, which kind of freaked out my poor phlebotomist….) Will there come a time when being around medical equipment, or being in a hospital, won’t feel so triggering, so emotional? I hope so. This was a tough week in that regard, since I also needed to be with my oldest child last week for various procedures at two different hospitals. I do not love being in hospitals.
Sheesh, I even cried recently reading through the results of my physical exam to qualify for life insurance. It was page after page of different medical terms and abbreviations, and I KNEW WHAT THEY ALL MEANT. I could see that my numbers were within normal limits, proof that MY kidneys, liver, heart, etc. are all working as they should. After so many weeks and months carefully following Kendall’s numbers each day, which were never as good as mine were in that report, yeah, I got emotional.
I was grateful to be able to give back in some small way last Friday. Kendall’s birthday ended up being….OK. It really was more about what the kids needed it to be. (I had my day on the 10th, after all.) We wrote messages to Kendall on some helium balloons that we released at the cemetery (no lectures on how bad that was for the environment, please – it was a one-time cathartic activity). I had printed more than 300 photos of Kendall with the kids (and those only from 2010-2017, so still a lot more to sort through and print), for them to put in their own “Daddy and Me” photo albums they had selected. We ate lots of Kendall’s favorite foods and treats, including a ziploc bag of his amazing chocolate chip cookies that I had found in the back of the freezer – the last batch he ever made, right before his diagnosis. My son put together a new Lego set he had picked out to do “in honor of Dad on his birthday.” Different kids needed different things that day.
Truthfully, the fact that it was Kendall’s birthday wasn’t what made the weekend hard for me. I’m struggling right now with remembering, and reliving to some degree, the events that were happening a year ago. Remembering those feelings when Kendall called to tell me about the tumor (I wasn’t allowed to accompany him to the doctor because of COVID restrictions). The frantic preparations getting him ready to be admitted to the hospital for his risky spine surgery (that had only been done eight times prior and that he may not survive, or quite likely could result in permanent paralysis…). Watching as throughout the weekend Kendall steadily lost feeling below his waist. Taking those “last” family photos on our porch as we were strictly isolating since Kendall had just done a pre-surgery COVID test. Having no idea that life would never again go back to “normal,” no sense of what would be asked of us during the next seven months, the next year.
I’m not sure how to best navigate all of these “anniversaries” I will encounter between now and March 24th. So much seemed to happen, to change daily, and most of it was just plain hard. Hard to watch. Hard to experience. So many milestones, except now looking back I can also recognize the “lasts” that we didn’t realize at the time were last times. I don’t want to obsess about this, that’s certainly not healthy, but I don’t feel like I had the luxury at the time I was going through everything to really process things. We were merely surviving. My emotions feel all over the place, and I’m struggling in ways I hadn’t anticipated. Guess I know what I’ll be talking about in therapy this week, right?