It's obscurely troubling, though understandable, that Sandy evidently knew how low her chances were – and we didn't. Or, perhaps more accurately (it's hard to tell exactly), that she knew that her chances might be very low, while we assumed that there was an outside chance that she would be in some trouble.
A slightly disturbing episode of House – where Chase's father comes to tell Chase he has cancer; hostilities between them don't cease; he doesn't tell Chase, but assumes that House does – while Chase, at the end, comes to see him off from an obscure sense of affection, but still not knowing; so that they play a final scene with different assumptions. The scene bothered me when I saw it before; now, thinking that Sandy and I might have played that scene this summer to some extent, it bothers me even more. It is not pleasant to be caught in an interesting theatrical scene.
Her choices in terms of information and discussion are understandable; I know that I was oddly proud of her talking to me about illness and death at points this year, although I thought they were rather distant fears, not of course near-certainties. And of course the truth is that her brothers and sisters weren't quite in the inner circle: she made a choice some years ago when she married, to turn away from certain things for the sake of happiness – I always felt that a close connection to me was one of those things, and resented it for some years; although I know she certainly still cared, if in a more distant, attenuated form. I've also always assumed that part of the distance was due to my being gay – though I am not sure of this, although I know she was conceptually perfectly fine with it, I think she didn't like the, shall we say, material reality of it. (Like the Mormon mother in Angels in America, when she says: the thought of two men together, it's so "ungainly".)
But here I'm battling with old uncertainties, faint resentments, ghostly attempts at mind-reading: my eldest sister's slightly sphinxlike approach to topics of delicacy always tended to make me (and my other sister) anxious, probably pointlessly anxious, that she was concealing more unpleasant thoughts than she probably was.
But that our more recent meetings, especially this summer, were partly based on me Not Getting It: that still bothers me. When you read backwards in time, and try to figure out what was going on... a difficult task of course. And one where none of the questions can ever really be answered.
•••
Later that night – a partial self-rebuttal: of course at some points in the years of panic and suffering, at points when I was pretty sick, I didn't tell my family a great deal about it. Probably when you can tell someone else over the phone that you are in serious health difficulties, they have advanced to a point where – well, to a point where you don't have much hope that they will simply go away. Like a cold that you don't tell your mother about, because next week it will be gone....
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