Broken Dolls Fly

After a season of numbness,
feeling returns.
Color floods you
all of it:
Fear. Dismay.
Anger.
Lostness.
A sureness you are not enough,
that fate has won the day.

Did I mention anger?
Anger that love found late in life would be squandered
in hospital tests and a painful end.
Anger that you would never see your children rise
past the launching you made possible.
Anger at the lost plans, the trips that would not be,
that no amount of prayers would save me.

The darkness returned.
So persistent you could not name it.
The last few months are a monument
to good training, to the power of autopilot,
fully functional, even when numb,
simply unable to name the blackness,
you lived, prayed, with barely a tear.

The tears come easily now.
You feel the pain. All at once.
and spend your mornings letting it flow over you,
a broken doll.
somehow still worth the playing.

About this poem. 

There is a numbness to cancer. I was not able to let myself feel it all as we were in it. I was Not. Able. A lifetime of habit ran my life for the past few months. Living and working as if it were not what it was. As if the potential for spreading was not there. As if I were not broken. Numb.

The numbness is wearing off. The emotions flood me most days. The fearful ones and the thankful ones. This slow processor of emotions is facing more than he can handle.

But it is better than the numbness. The numbness is a kind of death.

And, as my doctors assure me. I am, and will be, very much alive. And likely will be for a long time.

The picture was taken at the Washington County Antique Fair.

Tom