I am sick today. I woke up at one in the afternoon, threw up all the food I didn’t have in my stomach, took a shower and put all my strength together to get back into bed. At five, I felt good enough to go downstairs and eat some vegetable broth. Now I’m back in bed feeling like a ten ton rock with a nauseous core. My laptop is balanced on my stomach and my head bolstered by two ancient pillows that are flat as pancakes. My husband should be here in another five hours to pet my head and tell me stories. I’m counting the minutes and I’m going over the events of the last few days.

After Thanksgiving dinner when we were all sitting around the table talking, I asked my step dad Bob a question. I said, “I know that you’ve talked about how horrible and embarrassing it is not to be able to remember things. You’ve also said the pain is excruciating. If this is something you don’t want to talk about, please tell me, but are there any positive things that you’ve gotten out of this experience?”

He said unequivocally and soundly, “No, absolutely not”. He talked about reading in the bible about saints that were being tortured. He would think that if someone was in that much pain that they would just pass out. He talked about being in as much pain as he thought a human could bear and thinking, “Why am I not passing out?”. That was pretty much the end of the conversation since my mom kept jumping in and trying to change the subject because it made her uncomfortable.

When we got here from Vegas and I first saw him sitting in his wheel chair at the kitchen table I was surprised because he looked better than the last time I saw him in August. I told him that he looked good. His reply was something like, “yeah, on the outside”. When he said it, I thought of a Astronomy class that I took my sophomore year in college. My mind flashed on the lecture about the death of stars. When a star dies, when it’s “inner fire” goes out, it collapses in on itself. When it collapses, the pressure makes it re-ignite itself and it burns brightly for a short time until the it goes out again. The process continues until the core collapses. The processes of stars and humans are not the same of course, but at that moment with him sitting under the bright glow of the warm kitchen, it all seemed to be saying something.