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Terminal Cancer, Day by Day

Time Warps

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I’ve been cut-n-pasting old blog posts from our first year on the farm and also from my bachelorette days, and yesterday after a good two hours of living in the past it felt strange to leave the computer. I’d re-entered that headspace of a twenty-something: pre-kid, pre-cancer. That time of possibility and excitement, before the farm became half an acre and then 24 acres of crops. We loved farming for most of our 8 years there, but we stopped having fun in the final two years. Too many employees to hire and manage. Too many to-dos. I don’t know how we would have continued, if Brock’s cancer hadn’t taken the choice away from us. I think we would have kept farming, at least for a few more years. Headhunted more people-managers to share the work with us, maybe tried hiring migrant labourers, and definitely continued to mechanize the more tiresome and exhausting work.

Or maybe we would have decided the stress was too much, and chose to focus on our family more. Moved to Chicago so Brock could have done a Master’s program. I would have befriended American mamas at the playgrounds and started writing about culture shock.

What breaks me the most about Brock being sick (aside from the obvious “dying” part) is when I compare him to the Brock he used to be. The Brock who ran Makaria Farm was exhaustingly vibrant, full of business ideas and inventions. Nearing 250 lbs of barrel-chested goodness. The Brock I love now is 169 lbs of skin and bones. We have been so lucky that the cancer hasn’t affected his brain: he’s still Brock, still drafting farm plans and asking questions that don’t occur to anyone else.

I love reading these old posts and remembering the early years of our story together.

Brock in 2005, on our first roadtrip together.
Terminal Cancer, Day by Day

The Future and The Past

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We no longer talk about the future beyond a month or so. Practically speaking, we don’t know how Brock will feel day to day or even throughout the day, so we live in the moment and don’t plan too definitely.

And there is always that knowledge that he won’t be part of the long-term future, of my future or our son’s. But also, I feel like I’m losing my future too. When he purged his book collection, I purged mine too. We’d lost that shared vision of a house with a huge library and there was no point in my holding on to books that were good but not good enough to be worthy of long-term storage.

It occurred to me the other day that, when Brock dies, the last ten years of my life will die too. There is no one else to share those memories and inside jokes and little references with. Every movie we’ve watched together or conversation we’ve had has created this language of shared experience, and I’ll be the only one speaking it, with no one to talk to who will understand. The phrase “she’ll do,” for example, has hilarious connotations only for us.

I’m about to lose ten years of my life and my future all at once. This is why “grieving” is a long-term stage. I’ve been grieving the decline and loss of my best friend for almost two years now, and the horror of it will only get worse.

What makes it harder is that I can’t really talk to my best friend about it, because he’s the one who is dying. He’s losing his future and past literally, not just in an abstract emotional way. I have the easier road. I can’t let the sadness take me down, because my responsibility and role is to help him through his and be his champion. It is a privilege to do this for him. I will enable everything that makes him happy and gives him peace.