Circle Around like the Moth

This is my first morning back. I have to say that I missed my home and my people here. Driving across the country in a mini van, while it did have some pretty keen features, can be a real lesson in patience.

You might ask yourself why I might do such a thing to myself. You could say that this began in an ending. My entire family is a mix of cultures and beliefs. My brother is married to a Korean girl, my uncle was married to a Chinese girl named Alicia. They got married later in life, opened a deli and wrap shop and lived all over the southern half the United States, ranging from San Diego to Nashville. Two years ago, they moved into a beautiful home in Nashville in a section of town that backed into a national protected land segment. Right about this time Alicia started getting back pain and thought that she had pulled a muscle. Heading off to physical therapy, she discovered oddly that instead of getting better, she got worse. They did some blood work on her and discovered that she was severely anemic and the doctor ordered her to see an Oncologist to see why this might be. He told her to eat more meat.

Needless to say, her condition degraded and she began to be unable to walk for herself, having to be carried into the car and up the stairs by my Uncle Joel. They changed doctors. In the meantime she is helping her daughters Rachel and Bethany transition. Rachel is the first born, beautiful daughter and a a genius to boot, and Bethany is a mama's girl and is learning to not be joined at the hip. At Joel's insistence, the new doctor did some deeper work and discovered that she had a rare blood disease called Multiple Myeloma... which is related to Lymphoma which my Uncle Mark died from a few years ago. She was very young to have this, usually you are much older when you get this and so they began treatments for her. She was in and out of the hospital, her immune system missing entirely. They did a blood cell systemic graft to see if they could help this, she got the cells from her brother. This didn't work and over time she developed graft versus host disease and her immune system began attacking her entire body, starting with her eyes.

I received emails from them about every two weeks as they talked about their money issues, their needs, the medical saga and how they were taking it. On the last email that I got from her I had a feeling that she was getting ready to die. They didn't say it, and my Uncle Joel said that he didn't expect to happen so fast, but my heart knew that it would be soon. My brother called me late one night, and unlike some of my other friends, when he calls me late, something is going on. I found out that she had passed over on Tuesday evening and my brother Noah, my parents and I left Wednesday morning to drive to Tennessee.