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[Jan. 3rd, 2008|10:26 am]
Whole lotta labia.
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I have.. some things. Yes, I have some things in the works for the next few days. I just need work to settle for a few minutes so I can get them finished. Among them:
a) A fic. Yes. Some writing. It's silly but happy and I think we could all do with a dose of silly and happy these days.
b) An update on the girl. She is, as always, wonderful. She loves her family and her first Christmas is happily behind us and I'm glad of the year to recover.
c) An entry about Cait. Pam Houston, one of my favorite writers, lost her best friend to cancer as well. In her thinly veiled autobiographical novel "Waltzing the Cat" the protagonist, Lucy, talks about how it took her forever to discuss with her therapist the moment when she heard about the death. Her therapist asks why it took so long to get to the topic and Lucy says that she knew that when she said it it would always be like that. When you tell a story, in word or in print, you lock it in a way. You seal it and make it so and it is nearly impossible to undo it.
It has taken me over eight months and may take me a while longer because of that same reason. The longer the story goes untold the longer I can imagine there might be a way to undo it. But it has been eight months. My daughter grows older every day and becomes more and more aware of the world, a world which no longer holds the most amazing person I ever met. She inches closer to knowing my words and by the time she can ask about her Aunt Caitlin I want to be able to tell her everything. Even if it still hurts all day, every day.
So many of you met her and remember her. Some of you even met and remember her from before the cancer. And so you know the most amazing truth there is, she never changed. I've been thinking about that recently, at the end she seemed so kind, so wise, so funny, so irreverent and generous. She was always that. Always. From the moment I first met her it was like she was gunning the engine and racing towards being the kind of old lady you all want to be. But she wasn't waiting for the old lady part to come first. The cancer didn't make her braver or more adventurous or even more introspective, it didn't even make her nicer or more patient, if anything I got to watch her as every day she became more satisfied with the choices she'd already made. She wasted very little time in her life. Cait and I used to joke that the purpose of our lives was to serve as a warning to others.. I think for her that might have been a little true, but not quite how we'd orginally joked. Never waste a second. There are a lot of stories I need to be ready to tell when Chloe starts to listen.
I think I might warm up a bit with some little known facts about her that still make me smile:
1) She read a lot. And she was terribly clumsy sometimes. She was convinced she was going to die by walking in front of a bus while reading. 2) She once got so drunk out a at a dance club in DC that she threw up in her clutch purse while waiting for the Metro.
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