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.