There I am.

Here I am.

My mind shifts daily, hourly, minute-by-minute as calls are made and calls come, as e-mails arrive and replies stack in my g-mail account. Terry grows more confused, tired, is bed-bound but holds a conversation with me in which we chat and laugh and share silence. She mixes up names sometimes, but so do I, so who's counting?

Then a call to my mom leads to two hours of almost frantic conversation as she holds on, holds up, pushes away the overwhelming grief that creeps constantly higher and higher, as if rising up to weaken knees, churn stomach; she feels it in her throat and she cannot breathe, forgetting that she, only she, Rose, is the breather and the holder of breath. And so I call often and long, and provide her with a calling card so she can call me when she is falling apart. I hold it together. And when I fall apart, I find the pieces and I stick them back together. Because I am the heartless pragmatist while Terry lies dying and my mother flails at the gods. I hold it together because that is my role.

Terry would like me to come back to spend more time with her before she dies. She is doing better than we had expected, but in steady decline and there is no way to know when her mental process will lose the ability to bounce back after a couple days rest. I am battling Lyme disease - after a two-year delay in diagnosis - and suffer acute nausea and vomiting unpredictably after taking the antibiotic that is supposed to be killing off the spirochetes that stole my brain and body for a while last summer. It's all guesswork: will Terry still be wanting me to visit if I wait until after Christmas? Will the Lyme be diminishing so that travel is easier? Will my mother - Terry's mother - be willing to go with me to see Terry? It is such a long long way - such an enormously tiring journey to get to Terry's distant home on Vancouver Island. This distance is like a moat with no bridge. It's a hard swim uphill to get there.

Sastun has said he would like it very much if I could come. He says Alina is still angry; doesn't want any "strangers" in the house - even family strangers. He says it is not that she hates me as much as she hates anyone coming into her home. I wonder how she will cope with the huge change to come. It is safe to ignore her hate, since it is understandable - who would not rail and rage at death robbing the future? Imagine it. Imagine what is happening in a 15 year old girl whose mother, the only steady parent, only steady adult she's ever known, is evaporating before her eyes. Today is Sastun and Alina's birthday: Twins, as unalike as sister and brother can be, today they turn 16. And Sastun says his Dad seems to be tired and would really appreciate a break. When I asked about him, no one called Ron a kind, caring, or compassionate man, yet here he is, in the primary caregiver's role. I hope his sense of humor helps - though I sense little of it in his emails or voice when I call.

I call - chat - try to think of something to say. I breathe. I attend yoga classes as if I were going to church: with faith that this will heal not only my body (certainly it will help more than sitting in a pew) but even my embattled mind, tired of holding it together. At the end of class, we lay ourselves down for a few minutes in Savasana, eyes closed, fully relaxed, and this is when my eyes start to leak. But in public I hold on, hold up. Only at home do I give in sometimes to the sobbing and keening.

And then, the heartless pragmatist, I wash dishes and fold laundry and sand my new old secretary desk for pickling and setting in my tiny writing room. A room of my own where the stories will be written without Terry's input, without her faulty memory to battle my faulty memory in the emails we planned in our sisterly collaboration. Where is my collaborator?

Terry lives. Waiting for her time, she keeps breathing, eating, sleeping. She takes morphine when she needs it. Nurses come to the home daily, as well as home aids to help with personal hygiene and to help with her daily needs. Her bed was moved into the breakfast nook where big glass sliding doors look out onto the green hill where deer and rabbits nibble and nap. They had snow last week. Already there is snow again. It was snowing when I was there, driving those steep, dark, winding roads to and from the hospitals, learning what we didn't want to know.