The end of helplessness

I am not good at feeling helpless. It makes me angry, it makes me cry with frustration. It makes me feel stressed. It makes me want to shake my fist at fate and shout FUCK YOU. But more than that, it makes me decide. It makes me decide whether to continue to feel helpless, or decide upon a course of action that will alleviate it. And so I have decided.

I am going to Massachusetts.

I am taking a leave of absense from work and I am going to Massachusetts to take care of Tammy. She lost another three pounds. She's been on intravenous feeding for 4 weeks. She can't keep down even clear liquids, and even if she could, her pain level is so high that she vomits just from the pain, so they will not feed her via tube. Her veins are collapsing, and the IV hurts her arms, she keeps pulling them out. She is starving. She looks like someone on hunger strike. She is on morphine and percoset and she is not capable of understanding what the doctors tell her, nevermind making decisions about surgery. She cannot live indefinately on IV. If something is not done, she will die. And at 36, she is too young to starve to death because her pancreas has decided to be recalcitrant and the doctors can't figure out why. Or how to fix it.

But for all this... for all that I know that she needs a member of her family there to help her, to take control of her medical care... I am going there for me, not her. Not because I want to save her life, although that is the case, but to save mine. I recognize that I have two regrets in my life. And regrets,they are the most painful lessons of life, because the things we regret, I have decided, are the things we did not do. The price of inaction is too high. If I make a mistake, I can learn from it, I can try again until I get it right, I can fix it. But not regrets. I cannot fix, correct, or otherwise improve upon something I did not do.

I regret, when my grandmother was near death, telling her I would come on Friday, as soon as I was done with my workweek. She died that very day, before I left town.

I regret the 5 years of silence before my mother's death, my stubborn insistence, even wen I knew that she was dying, that I would call her, I would, when I was ready. Only she died before I was ready.

There are things I can live with. I can live with those regrets. But they weigh upon me. I carry those regrets around as surely as I carry Ryan's memory. But I cannot, I will not, bear the burden of regret with regards to my sister. I will not spend the rest of my life wondering if I could have made a difference by being there for her.

And in deciding that I will not live with regret about her, the helplessness lifted. I am going to Massachusetts. I am going to hold her to me, the little girl I dressed for school, whose hair I braided, whose crooked smile, even in memory, still makes me smile back. I am going to hold her to me and let my love seep into her and whatever happens after that... whatever happens after that, I can live with.