Punctuate: verb (T) to regularly interrupt something that is happening. From the Latin, punctuare, to mark with points. Proper punctuation serves to clarify meaning.
Italics are often used to enhance emotional depth, to peek beneath the blanket at the real story.
Comma
The diagnosis, caesura, a collective breath held then released. It demands another related phrase follow. Cancer, but. Surgery, and. This is not complete. This is not the end. This is a beginning.
Our daughter was barely 17 that night in the kitchen, when we told her about his diagnosis, about Esophageal Cancer. The next morning, she came downstairs with a letter, An Open Letter to the Tumor in my Father’s Esophagus:
“…Do you realize what you are doing, little tumor? You are stealing my father’s light, his energy, his gas station stops to buy Twizzlers, you are stealing away the joy and love and calm he gives to others daily. Little tumor, you can’t do this to him. I simply won’t allow it.”
Em Dash
Telling the story — the story is here, it started over there but it’s still a story, not a novel, not an encyclopedia — it’s something that happens separated from the life that promises to follow.
He loved being a plumber. He worked through it all, the daily radiation, the chemo. He insisted that his customers could not know. It wasn’t easy, but I kept his secret.
Semi-colon
The treatment plan is a list of things to do, we’ll do them together; together will make the difference.
- the first doctor and then the next and then the next;
- the endoscopy and the MRIs and the X-rays;
- the radiation (and the radiation and the radiation and the radiation);
- the chemo where we sit and sit and sit until the words run out but
- we are together, father and mother and child: a band of three holding the hope.
At the first chemotherapy treatment, our daughter’s first college acceptance arrived.
Ellipsis
Waiting for the surgery, suspended…it will be the same but different (better) after. It’s still the same story.
The setting moves to hospital basements that bear no resemblance to the upstairs, where there are pianos in the lobby and cheerful colors and hope. Hope is swallowed by scuffed linoleum and old fluorescent lighting, oleo-colored concrete brick walls and flat carpet failing to hide the dirt it is intended to conceal. Nothing is concealed here. A hesitation; then the story continues…
What became the first pass at surgery, the surgeon discovered polyps and stopped. Even though they were probably benign, doctors insisted on testing them and rescheduling. Sent him home. He went out with his brothers and nieces for beer and hamburgers. We stayed home, spent, barely able to breathe. He came back and threw it all up, of course.
Parenthesis
(the enormous surgery that will fix everything)
They removed seven inches of esophagus and re-attached the stomach to what was left. Recovery would be arduous. He grew less compliant as the need for compliance became increasingly vital.
Forward slash
recovery/every day we climb into the next day/sure we will see over the mountain/once we reach the top the sun will shine and he will swallow nourishment that miraculously brings something that looks like health/it is hard, the climb/each day determined to peek into a future that resembles the past/
After a procedure to stretch the esophageal opening, he could eat, some, at Thanksgiving. Our daughter, home briefly from college, saw things weren’t right, although everyone pretended otherwise.
Back slash
Arriving home for Christmas, newly 19, she glanced over at him sitting in an abandoned wheelchair while waiting at baggage claim.
“Mom, he’s…”
“Yes. We’re seeing a new doctor tomorrow but, yes.”
Hospice\Hidden on the keyboard for infrequent use\It sucks our feet from under us and levels us flat\There is no longer room for together\The pain sends us each to our own inner room\Every breath suspended\All I can see is the end before it’s even the end\the end is above me and around me and hovering over every moment burying the light until all I can hope for is\
Period
The end.
It started to rain as we were rushed to clear everything from the Hospice room at 3:30 am. It rained for two weeks. When the sun broke through as we exited the chapel after the funeral, it felt like a slap in the face.
Julie Rackliffe Lucey hopes to discover the pervasive in the particular, creating a conversation everyone can be part of. She writes from a window overlooking a purple house, and rescues, distributes and serves food under the umbrella of community. She has been published by Minerva Rising, Grace and Gravity, Coalesce Community and in the Reader’s Write section of The Sun. Seeing her work in Hippocampus is totally Bucket List.
Image Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/Linus Ekenstam
