Ten Years Ago Today

I once wrote about all the April anniversaries that bounce through our lives -- birthdays, death days, wedding days, first day of onion planting.  I feel like I wrote that one after April 3, 2009 because I remember how much Lilah liked that piece and this blog isn't that old.  April 3, 2009 was the day that we learned that Jon has Multiple Myeloma.  It was a scary day and the beginning of a tumultuous couple of years, trying to get our balance again. Early in those years, Jon decided that he wasn't going to be around for very long -- and he told me not to prolong the agony -- partly because he read on the internet that the average life expectancy for him would be 3 - 5 years.  He actually stopped buying new shoes for himself, thinking it would be a waste and he wouldn't get to wear them out.  Gradually he started to buy very cheap shoes.  Now he is back to normal, buying things that he needs and wants without thinking about dying before he uses them up.  I asked him to stop thinking about the 3 - 5 year number and to just give me ten more years.  What I meant was I wanted him to think in bigger chunks, and not to be such a fatalist.  He said okay.

So now we are at ten years. Of course I want another ten years. I really want more, but ten years is a good amount of time to think ahead. A lot happens.  In the past ten years, Jon has regained his health, he is once again overwhelmed by a list of tasks that never ends.  All of our children have graduated from college and spun around some and found a direction for now.  Ten years was not quite enough time to have any grandchildren of our own, or even to have any married children of our own, but in those years two of Anna's boys have gotten married and one has a lovely daughter and the other has a baby on the way. So we are making progress. It all counts.  We have lost both of Jon's parents in that time. The farm has gone through some major transitions --bringing in some new managers that had the potential for staying a long time, saying goodbye to them after four good years, saying goodbye to Ellen who had worked with us for 25 years,, and finally Jon and I moved our collective focus to Loudoun to learn to farm that farm.  Meanwhile, many things have stayed the same -- Blueberry Hill is still a cohousing community, Carrie is fully entangled in the farm and is now one of the owners, my mother is still healthy and strong, and we still have two family members from the generation after me who have returned to the farm to be part of it all.

The trajectory is excellent. I had a brief blip of my own -- all exhaustively documented on the couch blog (my own diagnosis on Feb 13, surgery on Feb 19, six weeks later I am almost all back to normal with just one remaining point of soreness on my right side).  That story is winding down, and it has been such an interesting and revelation-filled winter for me, with so many unexpected benefits.

In those ten years, just about everyone we know has gone through some big life changes -- people dying, people being born, people getting divorced, etc.  I think it is helpful to look back and forward in big chunks of time. It all seems less scary and out of control. Nothing is actually in our control, but we can enjoy the arc of our own history and we can also get a little less frantic feeling about the current disastrous state of affairs in our country.

Benjamin (and Rebecca too) has concluded that the only thing that matters now, the only determining factor in our lives at this moment is climate change.  He says that all the work that is happening in other important realms (social justice, racial equity, immigration reform...) doesn't matter if we can't address and fix that problem because there will be so much turmoil and large scale chaos and crisis, not very long from now. This is an incredibly sobering thought. I don't disbelieve it but I am not quite sure how to confront it. It is like we are walking on a pier that is shorter than we think it is and we are focused on the conversation we are having and at some point we will step off the pier and the conversation will be forgotten.  Can we figure out how to have a crew ahead of us building a longer pier?  It doesn't seem very hopeful with the current administration in place. But there are small crews working diligently.

We may all look back at April 3, 2019 and see how little we understood about our condition.  This is always true.  It might be much more dire than we realize. In some ways, it always is, but perhaps we really are on the edge. 

That is how I think about Jon's health, when I think about it. We are living on the edge. With every rise or dip in his M-spike, the possibilities shift.  We have enjoyed a long time of low numbers.  Some day his disease will become active again, or that is the expectation, and we will have to go back to thinking about that issue. For now we are living in a golden age, just getting older in the regular way.

It has been an excellent ten years. I would like to order ten more, please.