Down The Rabbit Hole

'I wonder if I've been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is 'Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle!'" - Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, Ch. 2

I've not changed in the night, but rather changed in the light. The past two years, for certain. Just this past week resulted a hodge-podge of travel, tears, tenderness, tumultuous emotions, anesthesia -- and a shifting of so much of what I knew in my childhood. LOL

Jonathan headed back to Kuwait a week ago tomorrow. Feels like he's been gone a month already...and when his gorgeous face popped up on the Skype screen I instinctively reached out and touched his face. We chatted animatedly for a little while this morning while I watched a series of flip-top yawns follow one after another, and I asked him to please go to bed. Jonathan and my relationship has changed me, physically and spiritually over the past two years. I glow. I grin. I giggle.

Last Sunday I left my home in the capable hands of Rand-all. Hugged Brett good-bye as he rehearsed for choir tour, had a margarita with Craig and Emily, and flew up to Chicago for the next phase of recovery from StupidCancer, and cried on the plane, missing Jonathan and dreading the pain of the next two weeks. Tuesday I lay underneath an x-ray machine while a clinician snaked a catheter through my arteries in preparation for a smallish surgery, where more veins and arteries were divided to increase blood flow to the chest region next week. I had a flashback to the pre-mastectomy tears of three years ago as I made the realization that I was once again A Patient. It didn't last too long. My Aunt Donna makes me spit out my food with the crazy things she says, and I am suddenly convulsing in mirth like I did and still do with her daughter Jennifer. Case in point, I was concerned that I might need a wheelchair to tour the Milwaukee Zoo in Saturday with an excursion from the hospital, and she said thoughtfully but with a mad gleam in her eye, "I'll just aim downhill." HA HA 

My Aunt Donna is not my DNA relative, but she has known my family for 54 years and known me all my life. Prior to last year she was simply, eternally, Aunt Donna of the Tupperware and peanut-butter pancakes and cooing-dove kisses/hugs at family events and Jenn's kooky mom. LOL Sometime around the time of my hysterectomy last year we became friends, women who had survived love and loss and betrayal and drama and kept laughing in spite of it all. This winter when my daddy died, she was the only one who listened to my grief AND truly understood the loss of the man I had loved, because she knew that man. 

This week we have laughed and cried and giggled and wept and laughed some more. The nurse doing my chart in the surgery unit listened to us warbling for half an hour and then remarked,  ' Your family is as crazy as mine. ' HHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAA

This week Aunt Donna of the Tupperware has become a sister-in-life to me. She also has revealed things to me which I will take to the grave that completely set my childhood memories on edge. HA It's the eradication of everything I've ever known. HA  

We aren't just Aunt Donna and Little Amy of the past, but two women who have survived much,  are slightly whack,  but still manage to get a kick out of the little joys in life. We have both lost much. We have both been set aside by our families and set our families aside, in self-defense.For so many years I only saw her as a mother, who had some interesting parenting ideas that sometimes didn't work out so well... and now i see from a veteran mother's viewpoint. It's a humbling, tender epiphany. She has taken me under her wing, literally, this week, and I am so, so, so, grateful for her tender touch after such a prickly emotional spring and now this short season of surgery. 

She wasn't the greatest mom ever, but no one was, except for a remarkable Young Lady named

Mary, visited by an angel long ago. I wasn't the perfect child, but no one was, except Mary's 

Wondrous Child who grew to walk among us and know us and offer us grace in spite of ourselves. 

This morning I heard her musical laugh across the dining room, and I suddenly got homesick for all things things that have been lost over the years -- while at once grateful for the chance to hear her musical laugh. My heart welled up and spilled over with love and loss. 

Before we could leave the dining room,  it was suddenly time for Friday Karaoke at the Spa-Hospital. I got up and sang  James Taylor's "Fire and Rain" and a few selections later, The Carpenters' " It's Yesterday Once More" -- and then, at the end of the hour, the chaplains asked if there was anyone else who wanted to sing. I suddenly stood up and spontaneously asked the gospel-singing lady next to me to come up and sing "Amazing Grace". She hedged for a minute, giving another patient at the next table time to say 'I'll sing it with you'. Thirty seconds later, three strangers picked out three-part-harmony with perfect pitch, and sang Amazing Grace with amazing grace. Praise echoed through the rafters of the dining room and through everyone's hearts.

Life down The Rabbit Hole. Upside down, things out of order, lives upended. Keep singing. Just keep singing...and when we've been there, ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we've no less days to sing God's praise, than when we first begun.