In Memoriam of Memorial Day Weekend 2010

All weekend long I was taking mental notes for a blog entry I knew I wouldn’t have time to write until Tuesday. Now it’s Tuesday and I’ve got nothin’.

That said, I can tell you that this was probably the best Memorial Day Weekend I’ve ever had (and certainly the only one that was eventful enough to warrant even remembering). Dan and I have never really been holiday weekend people. We’re just not the type to barbecue with the neighbors, head to the beach or launch the boat for the season. (We are, however, the type to spend the first nice weekend of summer inside watching all seven seasons of The Shield.) Because I have no school-aged children and am not a nine-to-fiver, I rarely even notice when the rest of the world’s concept of a long weekend has come and gone.

And while I understand that yesterday was supposed to be about memorializing fallen soldiers and not about a third day in the sun with my family, I have to admit that my focus was on the latter. (Though we did end the weekend watching Phil Donahue’s documentary “Body of War” so to be in touch with that particular brand of sorrow.) My mind has been so intensely focused on cancer, in fact, that I only last week took my head out of the sand about the BP disaster in the Gulf.

This weekend, however, was much more about family than cancer. With Katie coming in from Memphis last Tuesday, we had the entire family in town which doesn’t happen often. Two of my sisters as well as their spouses and children stayed at my parents’ house with Dan and me. There is always a certain charm for me (I'm not sure about everyone else...) to the chaos of a house full of family; someone always knocking on the bathroom door, endless piles of dishes, taking showers in shifts. I had a certain sentimentality about all this even before my mom was diagnosed but, indeed, everything in life has a new poignance about it now that wasn’t there before. Being together with my entire family I couldn’t help but be aware that I was together with my entire family. That mindfulness is shared and savored among all of us lately. We drank our coffee together in the morning as the sun glistened on the river and again later when it fell across the sky to the west. We played poker and Trivial Pursuit, ate crab claws and homemade lobster rolls, cheese platters and local strawberries, and toasted some variation of “to life” whenever we remembered to.

On Sunday, GiG had her heart set on getting us all out together for a lunch at Ocean Cliff, a beautiful Newport hotel which sits, aptly, on a cliff abutting the ocean. It was a sunny afternoon and a band fronted by a jazzy female singer played 40’s standards under a covered patio where we had a leisurely lunch, each of us taking a turn walking the grounds. We laughed and talked, a few of us even cried when the moment seemed especially rich or sad. Afterwards, my mom, a couple of sisters, nephew Ben and Dan and me sat out on the lawn in Adirondack chairs staring at the ocean and marveling at the different types of beauty the day presented.

Cancer came back today in the form of radiation and tomorrow will bring another appointment with my mom’s oncologist. But joy peeked out from behind the cloud of cancer this past weekend and not one of us missed its warmth.