Everyone in a family is hurt by chronic illness. The person with the disease is the most obvious casualty. But look further and it will become clear that there are many more.
Spouse. Check.
Children. Check.
Extended family. Definitely. Check.
We had a cozy little setup before I got sick. A happy situation with my mother and step-dad, who were enthusiastically involved with me and my children. Their grandbabies.
We lived in the same town, and were a four minute drive from each others' houses. I'd take the kiddies over to their house about once a week, and Granny would come by our house on occasion.
Since we homeschooled there was always a houseful of kids who would drop whatever they were doing and run into the living room for a visit with their Gran and Grandad.
We enjoyed this state of affairs for many years. It was wonderful for all of us.
And then I got sick.
The kids were shy of going without me. Eventually, they got over that, and the grandchildren who are still in the area now often have visits on their own with their grandparents.
Except for Jesse, who is also sick. Which is of course, yet another story.
But the old days of a familial throng pouring in the door of the grandparents' homestead had become a thing of the past.
To some extent a version of this was inevitable. Work and then college, and then some kids moving away, sooner or later was going to toss in a naturally evolving monkey wrench.
But ... that would have been easier to accept for all of us than the way things went down.
I just disappeared, sometimes for a year or more at a time, from my mother's house.
We all became victims of chronic illness. Everyone lost out.
I have periods of better health. Sometimes I'll visit my mom by myself, and we'll have a few hours at a time of figuring out the problems of the world, our family ... and some good old hilarity for good measure.
And sometimes the whole family will go, especially for Mother's Day, Father's Day, birthdays and Christmas. Though there were years when those didn't happen either. Not with me at any rate.
The kids are no longer children, between 19 and 27 now. They are old enough to go without me. And they do.
The dynamic of relationship has been set off-kilter. The balance has been set gee-haw. And the only thing that can set it right would be if I get better.
But even that won't return all that's been lost to all of us all these years.