what is left

You know that scene in the hospital dramas where the stoic but sad-faced doctor tells the patient and their family--There's nothing more we can do? And usually in the show, the patient is stone-faced and strong, and the family fall about weeping and begging? You know that scene?

Over dinner tonight my mother told me that my father's sister has been told--There's nothing more we can do. My parents got the news over a telephone call; my aunt and the rest of our family live in Dallas. Since the beginning of June, the cancer in her has grown, pushed its spider hands farther and farther and there is nothing more they can do.

I have been eating my anxiety: pints of ice cream, trays of brownies, fistfuls of grapes, bags of sugared almonds, illicit, late-night drive-through french fries, crackers smeared with peanut butter, whole bars of thick milk chocolate. I've also been buying books. I buy heavy paperbacks whose heft seems like a promise. I pray that my cousins can feel my love.

When she dies, we will find out in a phone call. A phone call. I wish somehow that I could reach into my cousins, my grandparents, my father, that I could reach into them and pull out the pain (I imagine it is a surprisingly soft thing, warm) and hold it for a while.