Schedule
When I was diagnosed with cancer
survivors told me
the waiting was the worst.
It wasn’t the worst,
but it was pretty bad.
Two months waiting
to learn the staging,
to formulate a plan.
Once the plan was in place,
I could cope — five months of chemo,
then surgery and recovery,
twelve weeks of radiation,
done by Christmas.
It turned out, though,
there was a whole extra year
of infusions
they hadn’t told me about.
No side effects, relatively easy,
but when the doctor told me
I had to come in
for a whole extra year,
that was the only time
I burst into tears
in her office.
I’d had a plan, a schedule;
it wasn’t fair to change it.
I got through with my revised plan.
That’s how I tend to operate.
That’s how I handle the big things,
good and bad.
Writing novels.
Moving across the country.
Renovating an old house.
Pregnancy.
Make a plan, set deadlines,
revise as necessary.
The Ph.D. was hard,
harder than expected,
but at least it had a schedule,
a predictable sequence.
Grief has no schedule.
Weeks go by, and I think —
oh, I’m doing better now.
And then a holiday, a glancing
glimpse of a card he once gave me,
a friend asking how I’m doing,
and I’m drowning again.
Nothing to do but endure.
Waves go in, waves go out,
inevitably. I won’t actually drown.
Eventually, this too shall pass.
But gods,
a schedule would help.
*****
2/19/24