Time, Timing, Connections, and Space #Diabetes #AtoZChallenge

It’s a disease which can eventually lead to things like blindness and kidney failure, both of which I already have.

There is a connection there, just one of multiple connections.

The A to Z Challenge – D is for Diabetes

My nephew has a father because of modern diabetes treatments. A magical pump, carried close to the body, able to deliver the life saving insulin a diabetic needs would have been unheard of fifty years ago.

Sometimes, at night when I can’t sleep, I think about other late nights when I would talk for hours with my grandmother. Sometimes she would talk to me about her little brother.

I think about that small boy and I wish I could have reached out to him, like I did to my own little brother when he was sick.

My mother never got to meet her uncle and I never had the chance to meet my great uncle. He was only four when he passed away from diabetes, back in a time when treatments were barely available or known.

It’s twenty years since I was a sick and scared young girl, but I was lucky to have been born after kidney dialysis and transplantation had been well developed. A matter of timing. I think about that little boy, so ill, and I feel a connection that stretches through time and space. I wish I could ease his suffering. All the bits of memory my grandma told me about that time and that boy.

I think of my four-year-old nephew and I watch him colour with his markers and jump on the bed when he’s supposed to be getting ready for bed. Then that other little boy pops back into my head.

I would like to write more about this, a piece about timing and connections of strange makings. I’m not sure this is entirely my story to tell…just one of many I can’t get out of my mind when I think about all that happened in my own young world, just exactly twenty years ago. It weighs heavily on me, somehow.

And so is writing about it not the answer?

***This was a result of insomnia, a late night Facebook post I wrote and thought it fit this challenge and the corresponding letter perfectly.

Long Month, Long Life #SongLyricSunday

I’m spending this final
Song Lyric Sunday
of 2016, talking about a song that explains something about me.

What best describes me this time of year?

Well, this one is a part of a Christmas from my past, my childhood, which is part of a bigger picture of myself.

The memoir I’ve wanted to write for a long time had certain songs ingrained in the narrative, as so many feelings at specific moments of my life define where I was at various stages of growth and development through the years, filtered through the truths of song lyrics.

This one denotes a Christmas, twenty years ago, one where I was ill and had been for months by December, 1996, on kidney dialysis for six months by that time.

***

A long December and there’s reason to believe Maybe this year will be better than the last
I can’t remember the last thing that you said as you were leavin’ Now the days go by so fast
And it’s one more day up in the canyons And it’s one more night in Hollywood If you think that I could be forgiven…I wish you would
The smell of hospitals in winter And the feeling that it’s all a lot of oysters, but no pearls
All at once you look across a crowded room To see the way that light attaches to a girl
And it’s one more day up in the canyons And it’s one more night in Hollywood If you think you might come to California…I think you should
Drove up to Hillside Manor sometime after two a.m. And talked a little while about the year
I guess the winter makes you laugh a little slower, Makes you talk a little lower about the things you could not show her
And it’s been a long December and there’s reason to believe Maybe this year will be better than the last
I can’t remember all the times I tried to tell my myself To hold on to these moments as they pass
And it’s one more day up in the canyon And it’s one more night in Hollywood It’s been so long since I’ve seen the ocean…I guess I should

Lyrics: A Long December, Counting Crows

***

“The smell of hospitals in winter. And the feeling that it’s all a lot of oysters, but no pearls,” stands out strongly from the rest of the lyrics, but a long long December/year for sure was how it felt.

All that year I had felt like crap and had felt unheard by doctors and a world who didn’t understand, but frankly, neither did I, for a long time before I received a proper diagnosis.

I heard this song on repeat, a big radio hit at the time, driving back and forth to the hospital and by December, 1996 I was ready for that particular year to come to an end, but the song and the memories would always stay with me.

My luck had been bad and I could only hope for a much improved 1997 and beyond.

This song is a snapshot of me at age twelve and it’s only so poignant because I can look back now, some twenty years onward, from that sick girl I was, to the woman I am now.

Sometimes life feels like things will never be better, like we’re destined to always suffer with something, but time does reveal how that can change.