I have been following Thomas Bickle’s story and I have written about his fight against a brain tumor. My son, Quentin, looked at this blog and saw one of those posts and told me, “It’s so sad.” Well, yes, it is. It is real life and these good people are hurting. He is moving on in his journey and his mother posted remarks about this past week – very candid, very articulate, very moving. You can check the site HERE or read her post below.
Sarah Bickle’s post:
I’m writing, as you may imagine every blogger doing, from the couch, in my P.J.s. I’ve got yarn and needles and a pattern book, garden books and mystery books and magaizines. Things to drink, my phone, both remotes, kleenexes and a little bag for them. It’s like I’m six and I’ve got the flu.
But no, it’s all because of this little boy snoring beside me. We’ve been on the couch for a little over a week. Thomas has spent very little time awake. Some of this is because we had to bring in the big guns to fight nausea, and those medicines make him even sleepier. Some of it is because his pain medicine dose has grown to a size his system just can’t take standing up.
And some of it, we fear, is because his body is just tired from its struggles. So Thomas wakes up to get more medicine and, when he is comfortable again, he is able to relax and rest.
We had to really think about the reasons. Our hopsice nurse is a veritable Madame Pomfrey; if we wanted her to conjure up something to keep Thomas awake and active, she could do it. So Scott and I have had yet another of these outrageous “How much doing is too much doing?” conversations. We decided that this, too, goes on the list of things that seemed like a good idea when we were anticipating this moment, but that doesn’t fit now that we’re here*.
Scott sent me a video at work – I am still working for now, half days, something I could not have chosen if not for all of you – of Thomas playing with bubbles. I don’t want to share it with anyone. I know, looking at it, how shocking it is. Thomas is pale and already so skinny, and he is laid out in the pillow and lifting his arm in the way that shows how weak he is. But what I can see, looking at it, is my son, having a moment of delight with his dad. I don’t know how to explain the way our horror and grief sits right next to our regular old affection and daily kindnesses and humor – all of it piled up together on the love seat of our hearts.
Novelist Elizabeth McCracken has a basically life-saving, sad, and hilarious excerpt from her memoir in this month’s O Magazine called “This Does Not Have to Be a Secret.” I may or may not resist the urge to quote great swaths of it here, especially the part about the “dwarves of grief.” She speaks of her first son, stillborn, and of the great “family tree of grief” that you get grafted into when something like this happens.
This part I’m about to quote perfectly summed up for me my feelings about the video of my sick son popping bubbles. I know that he looks sickly, and our story is pitiable, but what I see is Thomas and not The Boy With Cancer.
And Thomas is not dead, but something inside of me quickened when MCracken wrote, “I’m thinking of that Florida lady again, the one who wanted a book about the lighter side of a child’s death, and I know: All she wanted was permission to remember her child with pleasure, instead of grief…He’s dead but of course she still loves him and that love isn’t morbid or bloodstained or unsightly, it doesn’t need to be shoved away. It isn’t so much to ask.”