This year Memorial Day came and went pretty quickly. It was cool and rainy, and I had just arrived back in Colorado from a quick weekend trip to NY, so I was tired. But, Memorial Day in general, reminds me of Leigh.
Two years ago Memorial Day weekend I was in IL. I had flown out for two reasons. The first was Leigh, and the second was Grandma Eaton. Leigh was had been starting to show signs of memory loss and physical weakness at an alarming rate, and Grandma Eaton had fallen and broken her hip. Before I actually arrived in IL I had the fear that I would not leave without attending a funeral first. That never happened, and looking back I think I was so fragile from everything that was happening that I actually became pessimistic. That's not normal for me. Expecting a bad outcome. Usually I'm pretty confident things will be just fine.
Granted, Leigh had been headed down the road she was on for awhile, and we were all aware where the end of that road would be, but at this point it seemed like the speed had picked up in her travels. Looking back I think that we were a bit too conscious of every detail. I find it interesting how fear can influence a person's perspective. With Leigh, we were all so scared of what each day brought that we were hyper-sensitive to every minor detail.
On this particular trip, I was driving us to get some movies to watch and we were futzing (that is a Leigh word) around with the radio trying to find a decent station when a Justin Timberlake song came on. It stayed on for a few seconds because I was turning at a light and had to stop playing with the radio while I drove, and in those few seconds Leigh looked at me and said, "You dork!" And I looked back and said, "What?" Her response, "You actually know the words to this song, AND you are singing along!?!" I sat there for a second while I realized that she actually thought she heard me singing, which I was not, and I didn't know the words to the song. I called her out on that because that was how we were, and we laughed about it, but there was a part of me that thought, "oh no, what does this mean? Now she's hearing things."
I wish I could have turned off my brain, and not over-analyzed every little thing, but I think some of that is just human nature. So, on Memorial Day I think about Leigh, and how if I could give one piece of advice to anyone who is on the outside watching someone he/she loves with cancer - any kind of cancer - it would be: just be. Don't analyze what is, or what appears to be, just be. Not everything has as much meaning as we like to give it, and vice versa. We just need to be. Be supportive. Be loving. Be understanding. Be happy. Be ourselves, and just be.
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