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Sparkle (1)
I've been trying to start a blog for a couple months now. In theory, this should be no big deal. I used to have one, for six years. And I'm a natural-born oversharer. I've brazenly talked about my failures as a wife and as a single parent on morning TV. My Facebook status updates have been a detailed record of life's minutiae, from the delight of freshly highlighted hair to the irritation of traffic jams. And once a month in the editor's letter of the magazine I ran for six years, I'd craft a simple piece, whether about my promises not to overschedule and overanticipate for the holidays or about my sense of loss for having had only one child, that would resonate with the 10 million women who might read it.
And then I wrote 100,000 intensely personal words about my divorce -- a from-the-kitchen-floor view of the two years I spent lying down crying, trying to put my life back together when my husband said he was done with me -- for a book that I launched into the universe this March with much fanfare and many intimate interviews (including with BlogHer's Lisa Stone, on video!). New York Times, AOL home page, a 7-minute Today Show segment -- I was everywhere, sharing stories I thought people would connect to, trying to untangle hard truths about the mystery of what we get in life.
And then all of a sudden I wasn't everywhere. Everything went blank, all at once. Because my parents started to die. Suddenly, and scarily.
It's still challenging to describe what happened, but the shortest way to tell the story is this: Mom goes into hospital in January, pancreatic cancer is diagnosed, followed by a major surgery she almost didn't survive, three emergency surgeries, and one month unconscious in the ICU. My father, at the hospital for eight hours every day, waiting for her to wake up, handed out a dozen early copies of my book to the nurses, insisting I sign them because he was so proud.
My mom comes home to complete her recovery; my father is her sole caretaker, and my mother still has an eight-inch open incision on her abdomen. She isn't doing well, not eating, not really waking up. My father urges me to come down on weekends and talk to her, to find out if she is giving up, if she is trying to die. (She is not, she whispers.) Then, unimaginably, three weeks later, my father disappears (exactly one week after the book he was so proud of came out), swallowed up by a freak infection that ruptures in his brain, taking him away from us but leaving his body behind; he would spend the eight weeks he had left in the hospital, in the same ICU unit my mother had been in, leaving my sick, scared mother at home alone.
Someone needed to figure out what to do, how to manage the care of both mom and dad, and prepare to help them die. And that someone, aided by my two brothers, was me.
As the crisis erupted, I had to bow out: from my job, from my blog, from promoting my book, from everything, so I could be in Philadelphia as much as possible, while trying to keep home in Brooklyn stable enough for my six-year-old son, who was terrified by what was happening. He asked me, "Why does life have to hurt so much -- and not the kind of hurt where I need a Band-Aid, but the kind of hurt that makes me want to cry?" I never came up with the right words to say to him, but I grabbed him in a huge bear hug and rocked him until I was less afraid.
As I announced my resignation and packed up my office, I was stunned by what many people said to me: "Sounds like you found your next book!"
I guess people meant it as a compliment of sorts, but I was horrified. The tragedy of what was happening to my parents, to my family, to my brothers and me, was not mere material.
Because my job was public, my resignation was, too. And so on the two satellite radio tours that had been scheduled before my father fell ill, I was
