No One to Break my Fall
I don’t have a name. I don’t know what to do. I am not the person I used to be.
I used to be a daughter. Now, I'm a 48 year old orphan. It always felt like there was a bit of a buffer between me and death - the buffer being my mom and dad. They were a generational barrier keeping death clearly on the other side. But now? I'm naked. No one and nothing to break my fall. It's like I'm standing at the spillway at Wyandotte County Lake after a big storm. I look over the edge and hear the water rushing into nothingness. It's terrifying and yet there's a place in me that wonders what it would be like to just fall into the darkness.
As the only daughter I inherited all of the paperwork from my mom and dad and my grandparents. One day I was looking at MaMere's death certificate. It named her lung cancer - non small cell. I started wondering what lung cancer Aunt Kathleen had. I'm convinced there have to be genetic markers. Yes, they all smoked at various points but still four four of them died of lung cancer. I called Aunt Priscilla I thought Uncle Mike might remember what kind of lung cancer his sister died of.
"Aunt Priscilla, it's Jenny...So I found MaMere's death certificate and see her cancer was non-small cell. Do you know what kind Aunt Kathleen had?"
"Hold on just a second Jenny," she quickly said. "
Jenny, it's Uncle Mike," Oh. Aunt Priscilla brought the big guns in for this. "What's this I hear you want to know what kind of cancer Kathleen had?"
"Uncle Mike I am freaking out with all the lung cancer. There has to be something genetic. And me and my asthma. And then me living a mile and a half from Ground Zero on 9/11. I mean seriously...I'm not liking my odds. Aunt Kathleen was dead at 46."
So there I was on the phone with my Uncle,the cardiologist, who used to terrify me because he was so gruff. He was giving me his absolutely zero beating around the bush advice and comfort. I should ask for a chest x-ray every five years. That's what he does. Told me not to worry. I never smoked. But he understood the fear.
After Dad's funeral, Uncle Mike and I were talking about our shared fear of heights. I was regaling him with my experience driving Rocky Mountain Trail Ridge Road. And the terror. I just wanted to jump out of the car. I asked why when I am so afraid of heights all I want to do is fling myself down from whatever height I'm on - bridge, road, spillway, rollercoaster, mountain, etc.
"Jenny, I think it's that the panic is so intense all we want to do is to make it stop. On some level the quickest way out of the panic is to do exactly what scares us most."
The person I was before didn't voice her fear about dying of cancer, didn't call her uncle for family medical history, and she certainly didn't have sheer existential panic as her baseline. But now I'm scared. Every where I turn is another spillway with no light to tell me if I will make it out the other side.
Just the dizzying siren song that tells me to just let go.