Falling Sky

When the sky falls

It falls directly above me

Chunks of space left above me

An empty howling nothing that shouldn’t be there

•

An empty howling nothing

Pulling and waiting

•

Fissures fracture across the blue like fault lines on the ground

Foreshadowing where the next piece may fall

•

Sky falls when you hear the words

You have cancer

•

Lots of sky falls

•

Scans confirm it’s already metastatic

Another piece plummets

So much information

Type, subtype, hormone receptor, Her2Neu

Each a piece of forever lost sky

•

Cancer words hurl pieces of sky

To the ground in a show of gravity and force

Grades, mutations, invasive, lobular, ductal

More pieces

Stages

Chemotherapy

Lymph nodes

Trials

Genetics

Genomics

Treatments

•

Survival benefit

•

Bigger pieces fall

You barely notice because

Of the doom that distracts while closing in

Like a dark night of your soul

•

Metastatic

This piece hits like bricks

You’re never the same

Everything changes

Forever scarred

Inside and out

•

So many deaths

Each their own portion of fallen sky

Grandma, Mom, Pete, Jim, Becky, Susie,

Bobby, Karen, Marge, Kim, Lalay, Lindsay,

Meghan, Melissa, Heather, and so many others

•

Whose names do you remember?

Speak and give them voice

•

Irreplaceable sky fallen with each

Loss through death touches our souls forever

Like a shadow that never leaves

Or a coldness in the yellow warmth of sun

•

So many scans

Tiny tubes of skyless holes

Confining, enclosing, lifeless

•

Sky falls waiting for results

Slingshots take aim at clouds

We ourselves knock out chunks before we hear

News of regression, stability, or progression

Pieces of blue get patched and repaired with good news

And then fall again in bigger chunks with bad news

until they can’t be put back

Some things can’t be put back

Including the fallen sky

That won’t see sunrise or sunset again

•

Skies fall in countless ways

Some spoken and some silent

Skies drop cruelly with metastatic cancer

Piece by piece

Chunk by chunk

Section by section

Assaulting, assailing, and attacking

Erasing, eroding, and emptying more and more

Stealing, silencing, and stilling before our eyes

A persisting and prevailing powerlessness causing pain

For more than just the haver

•

Cancer kills

Murders

Slays

Massacres

•

Cancer carnage concealed in common language

Of either succumbing or statistics

•

What’s being done?

Where’s the urgency?

Why can’t it be solved?

When will all be saved?

How will we get there?

•

What’s being done is our voices

Speaking and shouting

More and more

We will be seen

And not silenced

•

More research slowly unfolds

More action and faces

More is needed

•

The urgency is the estimated 43,600 breast cancer deaths

For 2021 in the US

119 a day

Up 3 from last year

•

The answer is more resources and research

More advocacy, attention, and connections

Better treatments, more trials, more collaboration

Growing bigger one life at a time

•

I don’t know when all will be saved

I hope, I cry, I push, I pray

I keep going

I still don’t know

No one does

•

I don’t know how

But believe one day

Cancer will fall and be no more

Just like those pieces of falling sky

•

The sky has always been one of my favorite things

The endless blues

The different hues

The starry nights

The paint of sunrises and sunsets

The clouds floating freely wherever the wind takes them.

Still moments and morphing shapes change before our eyes

•

My home is still under its dome

Hope is in the sky

Let’s keep our eyes steady on the hope

Of today and all our tomorrows

And not those pieces of sky that fall

They will sadly keep falling

And I will look up to find

Handfuls of hope

Patches of blue

Where I can

Above