Life after Death

That's my life after my son's death.

I'm still trying to process all this, no surprise. 17 days ago Robbie died.

To see the complete back story, head here. It's the beginning of a long, seven-month saga that didn't have a happy ending. The short version is that Robbie was 19 years old when he was diagnosed with leukemia, the particularly virulent version AML. After the initial battles with how sick he was and the various side effects of the treatments, things settled down and in our naivety, we really thought that at the conclusion of the five rounds of chemo he would be healing and we'd move on with the next phases of our lives.

Yes, there are more characters to this story beyond Robbie and myself. Bob is my husband and the rock of my life. Kate is our daughter, sister to Robbie, and all round brilliant person who has at age 22 managed to graduate from college with all sorts of well-deserved honors and start her career down in Maryland. (Bask in that for a moment, a 22 year old with a career, the one she studied.) Other players enter, but these are the leads, the ones in the story day in and day out.

But I digress, the plot continues with Robbie concluding his chemo in June, a party is thrown at the hospital and we get to go home to continue recovering. Ten days later, he's back in the hospital with a fever, not unexpected, and eventually some sort of pneumonia takes hold of his lungs. Two weeks after he's readmitted we're told his AML has returned. A few days later it's determined that there is a fungal infection in his lung. He has no immune system to fight the fungus. Drugs aren't touching it. Let's remove 30% of his lungs to remove the fungus and see what happens.

What happens is that he started to recover from the surgery, but roughly a month later died from the lung disease that was a complication of the AML.

And that was 17 days ago.

I'm told that life does go on and eventually one or more of the following happens:

• The pain doesn't go away, but it's less raw.
• We start to focus on the memories rather than the pain.
• We never forget him.
• We cry, shout, grieve, drink, keep busy, etc.
  
• I get enough courage to clean his room.
• I finish writing the thank you notes to all the wonderful people that sent flowers, food, Mass cards, etc.
• Life feels normal.

There's more, I just can't remember right now what it all is.

Some of that is already going on. I'm trying to stay distracted, we cry and grieve every day. I drink, ok, only an ocassional drink, but a bit more often than before all this. And it doesn't help anything, for the record. Bob is tired, but trying to stay distracted in his own way. Kate is far away trying to deal with this with the help of her friends, collegues and us-by-phone.

The rest? Maybe. We'll see. All I can say right now is that Kate, Bob and I are still alive and Robbie is not with us here on earth. We'll see how the rest developes over time.