Sunday Muddy Sunday

Life has been jagged and dark.  Not so much for me specifically, but for those around me whose lives spill over into mine via bloody channels and unyielding genetics.  We do this thing as humans. We go on as if everything will be fine, as if not to do so we will make the worst come true.  But we don’t know, really.  How could we know?  If anyone of us could see into our very own crystal ball its reflection would most certainly be cloudy, dirty and splattered with mud.  We don’t know what will happen, we can never know, and that’s the most frightening part of it all. 

It comes down to, in my personal instances above, the juggling and balancing of chemicals.  Joey’s behavior: autistic outbursts, calm periods, happy periods, spikes of frustration and the rare meaningful communication.  It often seems that we're living on the proverbial powder keg. We're trying to find the right medication in the right dosage to control it, make it as functional as possible.  Still working on it; we have been for months.  My mother:  a storm of neuron decay, myelin deterioration, the thought process interrupted by breaks in the once smooth journey down an axon and across a synapse.  Electrical and chemical in nature.  Unfixable at this time in the history of science.  It is what it is.  And Dut.  She needs chemicals the most.  Chemotherapy drugs that will save her life. It has to.

Yesterday was Easter Sunday.  If I close my eyes I can remember two little children in the sun, a fair boy, dressed in a miniature blue suit with a matching bow tie and a dark-haired girl in a pink fluffy dress playing together, each carrying oversized pastel colored baskets –– laughing, finding candy-filled plastic eggs on a green Ohio suburban lawn.  It was twenty-five years ago, when Sunday was a special day and life was new, before autism and leukemia seized these children and dragged them down undeserved roads.  Now Sundays have come to mean obligations to me.  Deep, sigh-provoking obligations.  I usually pick up my mother for a few hours, we have dinner.  Smiling, I repeat things a hundred times and then I bring her back to the good-hearted nurses and health aides at her assisted living home.  Does she remember any of her visits?  She seems happy when she is here, being with family, petting the dog.  But, she never knows what day it is; she never knows it’s Sunday.  Sometimes I wish that I didn’t know either.