A call went out for blog posts about what Myalgic Encephalomyelitis means to us in honor of May 12th Awareness Day. It has been a particularly rough year and the prompt catches me feeling raw, dramatic and afraid, in a state of hoping to hope.
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This place is beautiful and breathtaking and for much of my life it was my heart. When I got sick, the grandparents who had always been my rock did not believe me. They nagged incessantly about why I wasn't doing normal things. They scolded me for being irresponsible, lazy and "making my parents old." My grandmother and I shared a doctor; she told the doctor that I was malingering. The doctor believed her. And I became unable to leave my parents' house.
I haven't been back to the lake in nearly a decade. The grandparents are feeble now and, like me, the place has fallen into chaos and disrepair. This is what I am told, anyway. We will lose it soon. As Silicon Valley barons came looking for mountain hideaways, the land became too valuable and property taxes unaffordable. Part of me thinks that even if I could return I should leave my happy memories untainted. And part of me can't imagine the idea that I would never visit this place again.
Sometimes I picture myself as an old woman wheeled out by a younger generation to see the lake one last time; they've begged the new owners to do me a favor. Then I realize that there will be no younger generation. Aside from having no children, I have been too ill to bond with anyone else's. I am "Mom's weird sick friend," of whom they are slightly afraid. And I see my future stretching out before me... a chain of square, white bedrooms, uninterrupted by the comfort of a wild and free outdoors.
But I can still smell the earthy air on a summer evening: aspen, alder and thimbleberry... and the scent of wet rocks as the river's water rushes over them.
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This post was written for the May 12th Blog Bomb, an effort to get as many peoples' stories out as possible on M.E. Awareness Day.
Use #May12BlogBomb on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. to find participating blogs or visit this list of participating blogs.
Thanks to Sally Burch at http://sallyjustme.blogspot.co.uk/ for organizing it!