July 16: Two Homes, Plan of Treatment, Adrienne Su, "Home"

He [Ives] would watch his son nod and think and think and think, contemplating the things he'd heard and looking around the church as if he were waiting for the statues to move, for the Christ to come down off the Cross.  He'd remember how the boy had always loved all of that from the very beginning, that he had, in some sense, two homes:  their apartment and the church.

Ives lived the first years of his life in a foundling home.  If Mr. Ives' Christmas had been written by Charles Dickens, Ives would have been Oliver Twist, begging for gruel in an orphanage, dreaming of having a mother and father.  A home.  Robert, Ive's son, is luckier than his father was.  Robert knows the safety and comfort of loving parents, a stable family, and a nurturing spiritual faith.  Robert is always home, wherever he happens to be.

My sister's doctors outlined a plan of treatment yesterday for her.  It involves a lengthy course of chemotherapy.  The problem is that the treatment is only available at the University of Michigan and another hospital in the lower peninsula.  She will have to live in a long-term care facility downstate for over a year.  There are quite a few other "ifs" involved.  If the chemo doesn't kill her.  If she responds well to the treatment.  If she doesn't develop other life-threatening infections (she's had a lot of them over the past year).  If the tumors in her head shrink and/or disappear.

If all of these ifs happen, my sister may be able to return to a nursing home in the Upper Peninsula, closer to home.  She is never going to be the person she was.  More than once, doctors have said that the atrophy in her brain is permanent.  She will never work again.  Or drive a car.  Or boss me around.  Or bake her Christmas pizelle cookies.  Or play Zombie Dice on my iPad.  She may never even speak again.

Last night, as I listened to my other sister outline the treatment plan, someone asked her, "Does Sally understand what's happening?"  My sister said, "All she wants is to come home."

That's incredibly difficult for me to hear, because I know she will never come home the way she wants to.  Her life, however long that life will be, is going to be spent in nursing homes.  That is a fact.  A difficult fact.

I'm really conflicted tonight.  I want my sister to live, but I don't want my sister to spend the rest of her time on this planet yearning for something she will never have again:  a home where she can walk and talk and laugh and watch TV and blow out birthday candles.

Saint Marty's home might need a roof and a kitchen ceiling and new front steps and an extra bedroom.  But Saint Marty has a home.

Home

by:  Adrienne Su

It is a long way back,
more than a drive
from dawn to the black
hours.  It is five

thousand days to a sky-blue
summer of swelling
and pain, in which two
sisters stopped telling

their secrets.  It means
restoring a dead man
to his office to dream
and tally, and a woman

to a classroom full
of girls, whom she orders
into the hall
and orders

to stop crying.
It's not just that,
either; a dying
uncle must come back

to his bed in the city,
Chinese be forgotten,
and four pretty
faces erased.  Often

I wake under the high
ceiling and can't
remember why
I'm here, and want

to die.  Then years
of memory revive
noisily, in clear
focus, but my life

isn't mine.  One
of the girls in the hall
has stopped and undone
her hair, which falls

generously down
her back all the way
to the floor.  Her round
shoulders are bare.  A

moment later, so is
her back.  Her legs
are bare.  She is
laughing, and the next

instant there's no girl
to speak of,
just the door and the hall
she's walked out of.

WWMTD--What would Mother Teresa do?