I think I need to start off with a warning…if it’s not a good time for you to read about cancer, stop now. I started writing a cheerful blog about my new position with the German Language Division of the American Translators Association and realized that I couldn’t start the blog again without at least once acknowledging what’s been going on with me. To put it bluntly, this has been the worst year of my life.
My father has been battling cancer for several years. At the beginning of the year, the treatments just weren’t working anymore, and it became clear that he needed more help. His home in Sedro-Woolley is about an hour away from mine. I started coming over once a week, and almost immediately realized than once wasn’t enough. So it was twice a week, until the day I arrived to take him to a doctor’s appointment and got the news that he had decided to stop treatment and transition to hospice care instead. I stayed the day and got things set up as well as I could. I didn’t have so much as a spare shirt or a toothbrush with me, so I had to go home that night. The next day, I came back to stay.
I expected to be a caregiver for several or many months. In the end, my dad had less time left than anyone, even his doctors and hospice nurses, could have guessed. Not quite a month later, he was dead.
This isn’t the place for me to write about what it is to be a caregiver, and what it is to lose someone. In any case, either you already know, or you won’t truly know until it happens to you. But this has been a strange lost year, and it wasn’t until I started to come back to life that I realized just how strange it’s been. There’s so much I need to catch up on, so I’ll start with just one thing: it’s good to be back.
