Rough Spring

Any of my readers who know me personally will know that this is a very difficult post for me to write. Things in my life have changed irrevocably.

Of course, like everyone, I’ve been impacted by the COVID pandemic and I’ve been quarantining along with much of the world. However, my own personal lockdown started a bit earlier. I have a traumatic brain injury (TBI) due to a closed head injury I got when I hit my head at my job in 2009. One result of this TBI is recurrent migraines, that I’ve mentioned before.

When I began my travels, the migraines were down to a manageable frequency of only once every couple of months. After a shoulder injury sustained Costa Rica in January 2018, I experienced a resurgence of the migraines. Over time, they got worse and by December of 2019, I came home to Colorado to celebrate Christmas with my parents and with the plan of getting insurance, doctors, and treatment for the migraines, which by then were occurring more than 25 days each month.

During the beginning of 2020, as the migraines and other health issues left me essentially incapacitated, I hardly left my bed at all. Then something bad happened. (I know–you thought the migraines were the bad thing already! So did I. Unfortunately, I was wrong.)

At the end of February, my father suddenly fell ill. He ended up in the emergency room at the beginning of March and was immediately admitted to the hospital with brain hemorrhages the doctors thought were strokes. Within a couple of days, we found out the diagnosis was much worse. My dad had stage 4 cancer metastasized throughout his body. What had apparently started in his lungs had already spread to his lymph, liver, spine, and brain. Cancer everywhere.

After a few roller-coaster days in the hospital–during which my sister and her husband and my brother, his wife, and their children all flew in from New York–we brought my father home from the hospital on hospice. My father died peacefully at home on March 13, 2020, only one week after his cancer diagnosis.

We were all left grieving and reeling from the shock and suddenness of our loss. My father was only 75 and had been quite healthy. The week before he was admitted to the hospital, he had been volunteering there. Due to the coronavirus crisis that was happening around the country and the lockdowns being mandated, we were unable to have funeral services at that time.

My father was an incredible man. An Episcopal priest, he immigrated to the US after he met and married my mother, an American choral conductor and music teacher. He loved travel and spent his life giving his time and energy helping others. He volunteered for years with Mother Teresa in India, with police chaplains in Colorado, with Rotary International, and with so many others that I can’t even list them. While he was always ready to go, he went so quickly, we were unprepared. I mourn him, the time we won’t spend together, and the many things I never got the chance to ask him.

My health issues remained, but I found myself putting some of my grief into writing poetry, which I could write on my phone while lying in bed, rather than sitting at a desk in pain, using my laptop for longer pieces. I submitted one of my poems to an online series being published by Indolent Books called What Rough Beasts: COVID Edition. What Rough Beast is a poem-a-day series relating to the pandemic during the crisis that is our country at this moment.

I was honored to have my poem, “Rough Spring,” published on their website on May 24th. If you’d like to see it, please click here. It deals with the topics of losing my father and this current pandemic. I was happy to once again have a poem published, but sad not to share the news with my father when the poem was accepted, as I had when my first poem was published in February.

As I work on improving my health, I continue writing and submitting poetry and hope to be published again in the future.

16 September 2020