The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Everyone in my family knows I go bonkers for Christmas. I always have. I love how everyone is generally cheerier for the month of December. Then there's the big ass tree and perfectly coordinated decorations, the baking of Crumbl copycat cookies, the giving and receiving of Amazon boxes that no one bothers to wrap because fuck it, the holiday movies (it's not Christmas until I hear the theme song to National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation playing while I put up the tree) and getting to spend time with loved ones you rarely see and then you remember OH MY GOD THAT BASTARD IS SO ANNOYING. It just plain makes me happy, and for a girl on multiple mood stabilizers, there's definitely something to be said for that. 

This year I managed to talk my mother into a towering nine foot-tall Christmas tree against her insistence that it would be too tall for the cathedral ceiling (but she later admitted she was very wrong, so I felt like a champion for winning that weeks-long fight with my mother). I made several intricate origami ornaments for my family tree (which just so happens to be Gryffindor colors, because duh) and favorite cousins so that a part of me will always be there every Christmas. 

My brother and I made gingerbread cookies last week. At first I didn't want to help because I was reading and didn't wanna, but then I realized that this could very well be our last chance to make gingerbread cookies together. So we made cookies, and it was fun making a big mess and taking turns with the cookie cutters, then eating nothing but cookies and vanilla icing for dinner that night, and breakfast the next morning, naturally.

Over Thanksgiving I spent a week in the hospital (for nothing (that) bad, just really shitty timing because it seemed the entire CT scan department took four straight days off)). It was miserable knowing that I was missing out on seeing twenty of my favorite people at the lakehouse over what could very well have been my last holiday with them, since everyone is doing something else for Christmas. This was supposed to be my last big holiday that we'd know for sure I'd be around for, and still fairly healthy-feeling at that. And I bloody missed it. Which is extra biting because I was in the hospital for needing two pints of blood. 

Sure, they passed around a phone for FaceTime and many came to visit me in the hospital for an hour, but it wasn't the same as being around my loved ones for three straight days, including my two favorite cousins who are like sisters to me. I wanted to talk to their kids and get to know them better now that they're all old enough to have opinions and interests of their own, but now I'll just be "Remember? Your second cousin who died from cancer." FaceTime isn't the same as actual face time. 

I missed out on cooking, baking, fishing, an ER visit, fighting, including what was apparently a very heated fight over a dying microwave, ganging up on the old people and talking about them in the corner of the room, cards, Monopoly, dominoes, and my favorite Christmas movies. Meanwhile I sat in the hospital rereading the Bridget Jones's Diary series and fuming that I wasn't at the lakehouse to witness Aunt Sarah farting out loud and thinking no one heard it, or legit losing Monopoly to a nine year-old once again. Those are the sorts of memories that matter, the stupid ones that only you and your family share. Everyone tells me I didn't miss much, yet I feel like I missed everything. 

As I'm sitting here at the kitchen counter typing this, my brother asked me what I was writing. I told him, "I'm writing about Christmas." His face instantly hardened. He knew what I didn't say: that this is probably my last Christmas, and we all know it. When my father came in and asked what I was writing about, I said, "how many Christmases I have left," because that seemed like a way of saying It without saying it. His face instantly hardened too. Great. I might be ruining Christmas by trying so hard to preserve it.

In August I was told I had a year to live. Since chemo is going well and I'm stubborn as fuck, I'm hoping I get more than one more Christmas, but if I do it will be a gift from God himself. And how many miracles can a girl get? I've already had two: having my horrible lung cancer cough disappear,  and my need for outside oxygen disappear as well, both thanks to chemo--whose odds of working were against me, as I later learned. But chemo only goes so far, especially with a sarcoma like mine. That's what makes sarcomas so wretched: They're known for being hard to treat.

You know what I want for Christmas? Fifty more Christmases.

The Lake

When I'm not in Dallas for treatment, I spend most of the week at my parents' brand new lakehouse in northeastern Texas. The lakehouse is gorgeous (in no small part because I was the architect who helped my father design it :) and sits only thirty feet from the lake on a highly wooded lot. When it was decided I'd be moving down here for chemo, my parents gave me the master bedroom suite because it overlooks the lake, has its own bathroom, and a large walk-in closet I could use for my art studio. It's like living at a retreat, complete with walks on the golf course, puzzles before The Great British Baking Show, Star Trek every night, plenty of pastry baking, journaling, and bad art. 

My favorite part of the house is in one of the over-sized leather chairs facing the lake. I can't tell you how many hours I've spent in one of those chairs simply staring at the water. 

The funny thing is I'm not especially fond of lakes. Or the ocean. Or rivers. I'm not a water person. No, I like forests with big huge pine trees. Hence my living in the Pacific Northwest for the previous seven years. I like seeing the trees wave in the wind. They feel like they're standing sentry for some great ancient force that we can't understand, and so they make me feel safe.

Since our lakehouse is deep inside a peninsula, and the water level is too low for most people to take their boats out, the water is almost always perfectly smooth. A single duck swimming in the water makes ripples that permeate far beyond her little body. 

I watch the families of ducks swim from one side to the other, or the herons stand on the shore. Occasionally a fish jumps out of the water, which is my favorite lake sight. When it gets windy, the water ripples and you can watch a single ripple from deep in the water come in and break on the shore. 

But most of the time when I'm watching the lake, I'm thinking about how I'm dying and what death will be like. I wonder about God and if heaven is real, if I'll get to see my relatives who passed, or if being dead just means you're Gone and you're shit outta luck. You spent your life, what's done is done. 

I think that's why no one ever asks me what I'm thinking about when I'm staring out the window at the water. They already know because they can read it all over my face. 

For me, dying lives in the lake. I think it's because I hope to feel as much peace in my dying and death as I see in the water before me. Not a ripple except from the occasional duck.

Death doesn't scare me that much (but then again I can say that when it's a whole year or two away), but the process of dying scares the living shit out of me. Since I have a tumor that metastasized to four other organs, will I spend the end of my life in a ton of pain? How will I muster up the strength to be brave when everyone around me is starting to crack because they're really seeing what this disease is doing to me? What if I have to make some really hard decisions that no one else dare make for me? 

But the lake. There's peace there, and so I watch the lake.