• The sickness is taking over.
    Two weeks ago, your skin started lightening. Sitting with you, holding your hand, we watched it fade from tan and healthy to sickly yellow to deathly pale. We saw the life drain from it along with the color, saw the struggling veins stand out, brighter and brighter until it seemed as though they, too, were paling. We would make forced, awkward jokes about how you looked as though you belonged in an antidrug commercial - how, as pale and thin as you were becoming, you looked like the posterchild example of Why Not To Do Crack.
    Monday, your eyes seemed to follow your skin's example. They had been blue, once, and then they were gray, and on Monday they started fading to white but all of a sudden came back. All of a sudden they were their lively blue, holding all of the knowledge of the universe, or so it seemed to us. We cried with you, laughed with you, genuinely, for the first time, it seemed, since this had all started.
    Two days ago, we noticed the yellowing of your fingernails and we tried not to point it out, but then we did anyway, and you lifted your hand up as high as you could - maybe four or five inches - and examined them and you said huh, my nails are getting long, and we cut them for you.
    A month ago, we watched the movies that you had said (so confidently yet so weakly, like you say everything now) you wanted us to watch together before together could not happen anymore. We curled up in an uncomfortable hospital chair, watching what you proudly presented as classics, like E.T., falling in love with them and trying hard not to register that in the future, these movies would make us cry.
    A year ago, you said, "it will be okay, the treatment will work," and we believed you. And we believed you not because we had no other choice, but because at that point, we really thought you would get better quickly, and you would be another survivor story. After all, those were getting more common by the day, and didn't we always give money to the leukemia funds? We knew, just knew, that we, like the growing number, would be a success story.
    Tonight, you took us aside, you said everything that you ever wanted us to know, everything you wanted us to do with our life and all that you wanted us to amount to. You gave us a very big hug, you told us that you were still fighting strong, but we could see in your eyes that you did not really believe it. We denied this to our self though, because if you did not believe it, we did not, could not believe it either.
    Tomorrow, as it sinks in that you are not coming back, not ever, ever coming home from the hospital except in an expensive urn, we will cry, we will never want to get up from where we are sitting on the floor because we will feel like every step taken is a step further away from you.

    Two weeks from now, we will be alone, very alone, because everyone will want to comfort the people who they aren't scared of. We are who they are scared of. We are probably unstable, probably, no, definitely, as is apparent when we hit a kid for talking about his father never being home. We face "why are you so upset? I'm not this upset," as though your nieces and nephews have more of a right to be sad than we do.
    Eventually, we will just melt into them, forgetting who 'I' ever was and becoming 'we' forever so that it makes more sense to be upset.
    Later, back when we are I again, it will anger us greatly that we ever had to become part of a different family to have a right to grieve, and it will never, ever make sense.