Another Year

Katherine after WWII

I grow nostalgic around my birthday, as I guess many people do. Not nostalgic for my youth, though I wouldn’t mind being younger, healthier, and nimbler. I feel nostalgic for what I don’t know, a kind of regret about not having all the information.

With this 63rd birthday, I have lived eight years beyond the age when my own mother died. In my adulthood, that’s one way I’ve calculated my birthdays.

The portrait photo above of my mother was taken, I believe, after WWII, before she left city life and moved to Williamson, NY, my father’s rural farm community hometown. I’ve wondered how and really why she made such a decision but people made all kinds of puzzling decisions after the war in an effort to regain stability and normalcy and create lives.

This photo shows my parents — Katie, or Katherine, or Kitty as her mother called her, and my father, in New Jersey where they lived and worked before transitioning to Williamson.

As I combed through my box of old photos, I searched for pictures of them in the 1960s, posing as a couple but found not a one. Why are there no couple photos? Was one of them always behind the camera while the other stiffly posed with their kids?

There is much I’d like to know about my mother and her early years and about her immigrant parents, from Scotland and England. The three of them boarded the Tuscania in Liverpool for their crossing to the USA and settled in Philadelphia. To help with that pursuit, my husband of almost 37 years gave me a DNA test for my birthday. What’s more romantic than saliva and information?

And finally, a photo of Katherine in her later years in deep grandma conversation with her first grandson, Scott. She lived long enough to meet the first two grandchildren but did not have the privilege of meeting the others nor the privilege of meeting my husband. Can’t wait to learn what my DNA and time researching on Ancestry.com will yield.

Seeking Forward

When cycling, it is pretty easy to find forward.

We are home from our travels, time spent visiting Shinto temples and beautiful Buddhas, strolling through the crowded, bustling Tokyo Tsukiji fish market and Hakodate’s smaller version, gazing at stunning snow capped mountains and blue bays, and straining to catch a glimpse of Russian submarines lurking in Petropavlovsk’s harbor. The trip did what it was supposed to — provide much needed distance from doctor’s appointments, PSA tests, and cancer. For three weeks, we did not need to talk or think about cancer and how we’d move forward but rather could distract ourselves, from the distance of our cruise ship cabin, with the political unravelings, intrigue, and chaos of Washington.

Now home and resuming the routine of life, including medical appointments, we are left with figuring out how to move forward knowing surgery was mostly successful but that cancer particles linger. Like thousands and thousands of other cancer patients and the people who love them, we focus on living in the moment while considering how to live going forward knowing R has cancer.

The beautiful, peaceful Buddha of Kamakura. We made “wishes” for future health and for help figuring out forward.