Standing in the Middle

Last week we got confirmation. My mom has non-small cell lung cancer.

We had an idea it was coming. She's 84. She smoked her whole life. Some part of me had already made room for this news before it arrived.

We're still waiting on more tests. To know the staging. To know what we're actually facing. But based on what we know right now… it's likely stage IV.

Two different scenarios.

One, a life that was stolen at the dawn of a new day. The windshield was huge. Barely anything in the rearview. Every possibility still ahead of him.

The other, a life well lived. If you've heard all her stories, and I mean all of them, she packed three lifetimes into one. The good. The bad. Everything in between. Eighty-four years of it.

Then there's me. Standing in the middle.

Not in the middle like a bridge. Not in the middle like something holding two ends together. In the middle like something caught. Like a man standing between two doors that both lead somewhere he doesn't want to go, unable to pick either one, unable to walk away from both.

On one side, a son. Windshield huge, rearview nearly empty, every road still open to him. On the other, a mother. Rearview stretching back eighty-four years, windshield narrowing fast. I am the only fixed point between them. The only one who has to look both directions at once.

I don't know how to hold both of these.

One is a life stolen before it started. The other is a life that got to finish its sentence. They are not the same loss. They were never going to be the same loss.

And still I'm the one standing where they meet, where the word loss is the only thing they share, and I have to answer to both of them at the same time.

Loss is loss.

People say that like it's a comfort. Standing here, it doesn't feel like one. It feels like being asked to grieve in two directions with a body that only grieves in one.

I'm so devastated over Ryan that I can't even comprehend another loss. I don't have the room. I don't have the strength I'm supposed to have for this.

I keep waiting to feel something that makes sense, grief that fits the shape of what's happening, and instead I just feel... flat.

Numb. Like I'm watching this happen to someone else's family, from the middle of it, unable to move toward either side.

Maybe that's the truest thing I can say right now. Not that I'm strong, or that I'll get through it, or any of the things people say to make the unbearable sound survivable. Just that I'm standing here, in the middle, between a son who ran out of time and a mother who is running out of it now too. And I don't know yet what she's going to ask of me. I only know there's nowhere in the middle left to stand.

I already gave so much of myself to grief this year. Now I have to find out if there's anything left to give the middle.