I am afraid of losing Xena.
And my body knows it before I allow myself to say it aloud.
We have organised our lives around her illness. Anand and I orbit her like anxious moons — checking tumours, adjusting dressings, watching if she paws at the wound, fitting the cone, giving her with food, measuring medicines, studying her eyes for discomfort. Love has become vigilance.
And now I have fallen sick.
Acid roars in my stomach like a pit of hellfire. It burns up my chest as though grief is rehearsing its entrance. A cold sore blooms at the corner of my lip — a painful eruption that feels like accusation. As if my body is saying: you cannot control this either.
I hate the helplessness.
I hate that my immune system falters under fear. That I am shivering while she lies there with a body at war with itself. I can take paracetamol. I can swallow an antiviral. I can ask for help.
What does she do?
She paws at the tumour that offends her skin. She endures.
I just lost my son. And I am strangely relieved that I believe in no higher power to blame. There is no heaven to petition. No prayer to bargain with. There is only flesh. Biology. Cells that turn rogue. Love that cannot prevent it.
But hell — hell I feel. It sits in my gut, acidic and churning.
I hate death not because it exists, but because it rarely comes gently. It arrives dragging pain and anticipatory grief behind it. It makes you rehearse goodbyes before they are required. It makes you ill before anything has even happened.
And still, she eats. She looks at me. She responds. She plays.
So perhaps this sickness is not prophecy. Perhaps it is fear trying to outrun reality.
I am trying my best. This has to be enough?
Hearts Still Care 