Why I haven't posted (a big fat valid excuse for my 1.3 readers)

I went to Boston with the hunky chemist. It was loads of fun. THen we went to Hawaii, which was loads more fun. On the second to the last day of that trip, we learned my mom's small-cell lung cancer was back, but just in the original single location. They started her on a chemotherapy protocol right away, and she was tolerating it pretty well. A week later, we had Thanksgiving. It was tasty. And a week after that my mom ended up in the hospital with (a) pneumonia, (b) a pulmonary embolism (blood clot in the lung), and (c) tumors in both lungs, threatening to block her major airways. Naturally, I drove like a demon from hades to get back to my hometown--the most beautiful coastal town in California, I might add. Not a bad place to have to go to in an emergency. They kept her in the hospital a week, and now she's home, hooked up to oxygen 100% of the time and taking nine different meds each day, undergoing radiation daily (for 15 days) and then starting a different chemotherapy protocol. The cancer is incurable, but she's hoping treatment will push it back into remission for a little while, or at least shrink the tumors enough so she can breathe easier and hang around longer with us rather than in the next realm with Dad and her parents. I'm learning to be a caregiver. Lucky for me I can telecommute work. Can't so easily telecommute my relationship, so I'm rallying the siblings to be here in shifts in the periods of time when I'm gone.
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The other night Mom and I were watching television together. She was having a good day (no major bouts of coughing, energy relatively up) and wanted to catch up on a show she'd started watching halfway through a season. I have to say it's disturbing when your parent has a terminal disease and yet really loves the show "Six Feet Under." But that's not what made me feel like crying that night. What made me feel like crying that night was the sight of cornflakes falling into my cereal bowl (I was hungry and that's what was handy). For some bizarre reason I don't start tearing up at the tough stuff like Mom not being able to walk down the front porch step for the paper. What hits me hard is weird things like cereal and my email crashing and that Christmas ornament I made when I was in fourth grade and that still hangs, tattered but cheery, on our lighted fir tree.