Caregiver

I was 26 years old.

I was building my career, trying to chase love, making life choices, and enjoying the ride.

Then my mom told me she had cancer. Again.

Everything else was put on hold.

I was going to help her beat it.

I made every oncologist visit, treatment, blood transfusion, and surgery. I took care of meals, her cats, and when the treatments took it out of her, I took care of her.

The insidious thing about cancer is that you never know if or when it’s going to come back. And it kept coming back.

I kept working, but I stagnated. I tried chasing love, but I was tired, shell shocked, and made bad decisions. My life choices whittled down to that one thing, caregiving, and choosing from one thing tends not to be a choice. I stopped enjoying things.

It wore on me.

I couldn’t keep it up, but I had to anyway, and I did.

Then seven years of that later, she died.

I never thought I’d look back on those caregiving years as the good old days, but those were the days my mom was still living, and after the darkness of dusk came night.