10.24.03 - 6:07 p.m.

the news just gets worse. mom went into the hospital last night, and i talked to her before i went to bed. she asked me to call her in the morning before i went to work, and so about 7:30 a.m. i called her and talked to her so very briefly. her voice broke and it's hard to know what to do when your mother is scared and alone in the hospital. isn't that... well, isn't that what moms are for? i mean, the other way around?

so, this afternoon my dad called me. the surgery was finished and he spoke with the surgeon. the surgeon found more tumor than he anticipated, and apparently said that the lymph nodes were visibly involved. he took out everything he could see, but... he thinks the cancer started not in the ovaries but in the uterus, and spread to the ovaries and the lymph nodes. and whatnot. so, she'll need chemotherapy after she recovers from surgery. it's not particularly encouraging, and it's so much harder to imagine the worst now than it was a month ago, because a month ago it was all a distant prospect and now, well, my mom has gone from being completely a completely healthy 56 year old to a woman whose cells have fundamentally betrayed her and who faces a long, unpleasant course of treatment and who knows what the outcome will be?

i can't imagine what will happen to my dad if something happens to mom. if it were vice-versa, my mom... well, nuts as she is, she'd be okay. i'm much more like dad than mom, personality-wise, but there's something to be said for being outgoing, even if you couple that with a weird need to take everything too seriously. but dad, my god - his mom this summer, his wife this fall? it's completely unfair. and i think he's prone to depression, maybe a little bit, and he's reserved and ... i just don't know. outside her immediate sphere of influence, my mom's neuroses become loveable eccentricities. she tries so hard. she can't help who she is.

and she can't help what she has, and there's nothing i can do and i absolutely hate that. i hate everything that's happening.

i found my rosary and said a decade for possibly the first time ever. maybe if i buy the house across from the catholic church and the priest's house, we can get a reprieve, you think? i said a rosary, and i lit a candle, and it is completely fucking unfair and i fucking hate it, and i have to get it together so i can go see her tomorrow and this weekend and be there for her and i'm not sure how to do that without completely breaking down, and i don't know how i made it home today, and smiled at my coworkers and wished them a nice fucking weekend without falling into a hundred little pieces.

i love you, mom. :( more than i can say.