A New Beginning

“We were sitting at the kitchen table in our usual spots, my mother drinking her usual decaf tea with Sweet N’ Low, me with my usual mug of English Breakfast and sugar. Even though I hadn’t lived at home in four years, all it took was an oversized mug of microwaved tea and a couple of Reese’s peanut butter cups to make me feel like I’d never left.” - The Devil Wears Prada, Lauren Weisberger

As I prepared myself for my first real vacation since being in Cameroon at the end of March, my mother began calling with updates from home regarding my grandmother’s failing health. In February while I was in the capitol for the GRE they found that her cancer had migrated into her lungs, what the chemo had successfully prevented the last 5 years. We knew this news was bad but they restarted her treatment and waited to see how it went.

She frequently felt lousy after her treatment and this time was no different, the family thought at first. It turns out she had contracted a serious infection that wound up placing her in the hospital a couple weeks later. As she had already had a treatment or two, her immune system was too weak to fight the infection and a month later she was still in the hospital. Her body, it seems, has gotten too tired. The very same day I planned to travel my mom called to add that, in addition to Shingles, a yeast infection, and the C-diff, she was having congestive heart failure and had barely eaten in weeks. Thus, two days later I was on a plane back to Ohio.

The day I arrived Grandma had been moved to a hospice facility. John and Adrienne picked me up from the airport and we went straight there. Her room felt peaceful and warm, like a nice hotel room that first night. It was so nice in some ways to be back with the family, despite the circumstances. Those first few days at the facility were the toughest because she seemed to be suffering a great deal, unable to swallow or even suck on a straw, moaning constantly, waking up every 2 hours. I hated to see her in that state but to our surprise, just a couple days later she was sitting up, eating a lot more, talking a lot more, and having less pain. She was pretty clear about not having any desire to die right now.

The family was under the impression from the beginning that if she’d just start eating again she could get strong enough to go back to chemo, since they discovered that the first few treatments had in fact been working.

Post continued May 22nd

It has been three weeks since I began the last post. Time feels completely nonexistent lately. I have been back in Cameroon all this time. I came back to the same flood of work I had left behind only now all the more confusing because it’s exam period and school is ending and it is more chaotic than ever and it‘s all coupled with the most grievous event of my life.

The whole village was happy to see me, greeting me with even greater smiles than when I’d first arrived. Many people stopped by to welcome me back. In some ways I have been comforted and other ways exhausted. Exhausted by the constant analysis of my every move. The constant knowledge of where I’ve been, why, and the barrage of questions. Last Saturday Grandma passed away. It was a very bittersweet weekend, for some reasons I won’t discuss here. Claude and I were going to a wedding that night. We had gone out for a walk and I’d actually left my cell phone at the house. I figured Mom had his number if she needed to reach me.

I came back to get ready for the wedding and saw two missed calls from her. Before I could even process anything she rang again and I answered. I could tell her voice seemed timid and searching. Trying to figure out where I was before she broke the news.

Though I’d known she was dying it came as a surprise. Having been present in the hospice for a month and watched numerous patients coming in and passing away we had picked up on a sort of evident process that seems to occur so that the family has enough time to organize and come to the bedside of their loved one before they’re gone. For mom the call came in the middle of the night and 3 hours later Grandma had already passed away. Mom wasn’t even there either because Grandpa hadn’t been feeling well and they had to take him back home.

In some ways I feel the world has shifted like the movement of the tectonic plates during an earthquake. How can life ever be quite the same again? My grandmother was a second parent to me. She never missed a major event in my life, she never faltered in support of my every ambition. She was a wonderful friend, mentor, listener, and she always made me laugh. Even in those last memories with her in the hospital I was deeply moved by her spirit of strength and resilience; always refusing pain medicine and talking as if at any moment she would be right back to her old self again.

To be so many miles away and grasp that she’s really gone is tough. To help myself get some finality and to support the rest of the family I will go back to the US again in a week to attend her memorial service. With cancer everyday is a gift. You are really just fighting against time. We always knew that. We stayed positive, especially Grandma did, and we tried to come to terms with what seemed the inevitable end of her story. Yet, even after 5 years of familiarizing yourself with the idea, and even after seeing her so at peace in those last weeks, you can never prepare yourself for how deeply and sharply you will miss the person.

The people here deal so commonly with death that they seem to, in some ways, to have developed a certain indifference to it. Every weekend most of the people of my village are attending a funeral or assisting a family who’s lost someone by sitting with them through their grief. Sometimes I feel alone because, though they offer their sincere condolences and comforting words, how can they really fully understand the depth of my loss when their families are so large and so often parents play such a distant role in their childrens’ lives? I know in reality that loss is loss and everyone in the world has a different definition of what family is but in the end, it always is the most important thing to most people in life anywhere in the world.

Being thrown back into school has been frustrating. The Cameroonian system feels to me like putting a newly walking baby at the bottom of a mountain and then telling them to climb up. The expectations are so outrageous that it’s discouraging even for me. I have been so busy with writing lesson plans, writing tests, grading, averaging, and filling out report cards since September that I’ve had very little time or energy for much of anything else at all. I have a hard time getting the villagers to understand this. Many of them comment on me not being constantly outside, socializing with everyone and walking all over the place. I think having a job with scheduled hours makes it harder for us to relate.

The other day for a couple of seconds sitting in my living room, I could hear birds outside and I had to cry. I know that I always talk about how peaceful it is here, and that is true, but not necessarily in a literal sense. Life here is centered around a culture without cars. Therefore, people live far more congested than generally in the States. On a daily basis there are very few moments of actual peace and quiet in my life here. In the morning I can hear babies crying, dishes being washed by my neighbors outside, kids running around getting ready for school. In the afternoon it’s still babies’ crying, people walking past talking loudly, motorcycles and big trucks that, on the dirt road, make my whole house shake until I can hear the window panes rattling, and before too long, the barrage of students broken free from school and noisier than ever. At night there are… you guessed it, babies crying!, the neighbors sitting around having dinner or chatting, everyone getting their baths, fighting and screaming, or doing their final daily chores. Often when I want to sleep I can hear the music all the way from the market, a good half mile or more away, like when you’re next to some teenage bonehead’s bass, and then the straggling drunks that roll home talking much more loudly than usual at wee morning hours. If it’s raining it’s louder than ever because the rain pounds on the tin roof with such vigor. Last week there was an evangelical church in town that sent a guy out all over the village with a megaphone, enticing people to come to what seemed to be an almost- all night- long service involving loud preaching and lots of dancing and drums.

This is everyday in a nutshell. I usually try to fall asleep by around 10 and by 6 or sometimes earlier, the rooster has already crowed again to wake up and repeat. I have so very little free time and yet feel so much pressure. Sometimes I can’t distinguish what of my frustrations are probably felt by every single Peace Corps Volunteer and what must be individual to my experience. On an at least weekly basis people ask me when I’m going to invite them out (A.K.A. when am I going to buy them a drink), when I’m going to invite them to my house, when am I going here or there and so on. People seem to have this unalterable impression that I have an endless stream of money, despite how many times I have explained that I don’t probably even make as much as many of the Cameroonian teachers do and happen to be buried under the traditional American Shitpile of Debt. Though they never see me out except on occasion having a beer or two, they don’t see me traveling all over the place or always having new things. My house is pretty simple and the only things that aren’t I didn’t even pay for but acquired. My house isn’t even paid for by me personally.

This week I’ve done nothing but the last of the year’s calculating, ranking, and preparing for class counsel. Somehow people offer their support but then seem to expect you to snap right back to normal. Friday is my birthday, which I happened to casually mention to a couple of my colleagues who informed me that this means I have to buy a bottle of expensive whiskey and they are going to come to my house to drink it. Later one of them even tried to embellish a little more about how usually people invite their friends over and prepare chicken and all kinds of things. Now I seem almost obligated to have them over, in fact they are literally just telling me they’re coming and since one of them is an administrator at the school it would be a bit taboo to refuse them. So, by the time I have a second to finally take a breath and process that Grandma is really gone, I will be packing a suitcase to fly home and really say the most painful goodbye of my life.

Alas! This is why you haven’t heard from me in a couple of months but, I’m still here. Life is more bizarre than ever but there is also a lot of hope for bright things ahead. So, we keep on moving. And talk about life really moving and a shaking, Grandma’s memorial service is exactly one year from the day I arrived on Cameroonian soil. All I know for sure is that Grandma always supported every ambition I ever had, as crazy as a lot of mine are. For whatever reason I always believed I had to do this whole Peace Corps thing before I could really get on with my life, my future, my family, so here I am. One thing I do believe, as frustrating as all the commotion and noise can often be for someone so accustomed to a healthy amount of ‘me-time’, it will probably be what gets me through this period more than anything else ever could.