Zibby Mag

By Cate Stern

We rush into my parents’ car, or at least as much as my dad can hurry in his state. I accelerate over a speed bump, and he winces and says, “You don’t have to drive fast.” He’s only two weeks post-surgery, and though he doesn’t complain much, he’s still in pain.

My mom is watching my youngest baby, and I worry it’s too much for her to handle. Audrey was born in April 2020, and on the eve of her first birthday, she hasn’t even had a babysitter. “I can drive myself, you know,” my dad says.

Before we make it to the oncology center where they will adjust my dad’s port, I pull off the main drag and circle the parking lot of a harbor. My husband parked our car here and took our two older kids and their cousins boating around the Gulf of Mexico.

We forgot to switch cars, and I have no car seat, which is why the baby is with my mom, and why my dad and I are now in the harbor parking lot, climbing out of one car and into another.

We are all in town because my dad is dying.

By the time Audrey was a month old, we were well-versed in phrases like “mask up” and “flatten the curve” and “social distancing”. Only a few weeks later our family also started saying things like “stage IV,” “metastatic,” and “palliative.”

It was unnerving how life — bundled up and strapped tightly with degrees and weddings and children, decades of sipping coffee and wine, working out and working late, road trips, home improvement, and meals — could all come undone so quickly.

We were fortunate to have the flexibility to be able to spend the summer in a small rental — smaller than our old apartment — right on the Gulf near my parents. We hoped our being close to the water, watching dolphin surface and ibis hunt for shellfish, would help in some way.

One evening I slipped out onto the deck and sank into a plastic Adirondack chair, my head tilted back and up at the sky. I pressed the phone to my ear and described the setting sun to my dad, alone in the hospital waiting for a big surgery. Burning oranges with pinks and purples moving and changing like a kaleidoscope.

He had lost more than twenty pounds in a month, and it didn’t seem as though his body could withstand much more. We talked about my childhood, the trips we took together, and his life, tears seeping out of my eyes as I told him, “Thank you.”

The surgery was a success, and my dad, able to eat again, steadily gained enough strength to plunge his body through several courses of chemotherapy. We moved back home, where the ordinary and mundane tasks of living — cleaning the dishes, folding the laundry, nursing the baby — and the talk of “surges” and “death tolls” and “prognosis” wove into a disconcerting routine for the fall.

In December, we pulled the girls from school and drove to Florida for Christmas. My dad still looked good. We thought maybe this thing would turn around, maybe there was reason to hope.

After the holidays, the girls went back to remote learning because of an increased infection rate in our area. Plans to write more, to work on professional goals, to recenter myself after the baby were again put on hold.

I couldn’t ignore the dull ache, the drumbeat of disappointment telling me that the cancer and the virus were eating at me, too, commandeering my time and my emotions. I was sad and angry, and there was nothing I could do.

Iturn to books for escape and wisdom. Katherine May’s Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times is a gentle reminder that I am not alone in this struggle between forward motion and the hazy, sometimes stagnant, hold of a liminal space — the space that is neither the before or the after.

Despite the messaging that attempts to convince us we must keep up productivity year-round, these “winters,” as May calls them, are a normal part of being human. The idea of wintering appeals to me: embrace the cold and learn its lessons, brew a mug of tea, comfort and care for yourself as the season passes.

But I also wonder — what becomes of those of us whose winters are long with no consistent springs or summers? What becomes of those of us who feel like we are in Narnia and the White Witch has frozen us into a hundred-year season of snow and cold? What then?

In Naima Coster’s debut novel, Halsey Street, the protagonist Penelope drops out of art school and returns to Brooklyn to care for her ailing father, Ralph Grand. She brings all of her paintings with her “because they were proof that she had once thought art would be her whole life, and not one habit of many.” Ralph expects Penelope “to listen to him and agree, to let him again be Mr. Grand, expert and legend. He seemed to need it more now than ever.”

And who could blame him? It’s hard to lose one’s spot at the peak of the mountain; it’s disorienting to relinquish the illusion of control. But returning home to help, occupying that other liminal space between child and adult, is easier said than done: “and although Penelope wanted to please her father, she couldn’t go back to the girlhood habit of putting away herself.”

We’ve now received news that is somehow bleaker. My dad’s disease has spread significantly, and the surgeon says he has months, maybe more, maybe less. So we, along with my sister-in-law and her kids, are here with my parents, trying to insert joy and normalcy into our personal tragedy.

I drop my dad at the oncologist and drive back to my parents’ house to get Audrey before returning to pick him up. Windows down, I play the song on the radio as loudly as I like, because all I can really control, for now, is the volume of the music.

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Cate Stern is an attorney and mother of three in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her writing has appeared on the blogs Motherhood Untitled and Not Safe For Mom Group. She is currently working on her first novel.