Pies in a time of Cancer

We had a pleural tap yesterday.

Rephrase that:  Dad had a pleural tap.

Dad had increasing trouble breathing the previous day and night - and so Dr. Tony Bishwas and the team came over mid-morning to drain the fluid that had accumulated in Dad's pleural cavity.  The cancer in the lungs has been producing more fluid than is normally drained from this cavity.  This fluid build up is called a plural effusion and makes it hard to breathe as the lungs are crowded in.

Dad had undergone a similar procedure a week prior which gave him much relief.  A whole litre of fluid had been removed then.  Yesterday's procedure went well.  Instead of going over to the hospital, the whole team came to Dad's room.  The blessings of being here.

While the procedure was taking place in Dad's room, another procedure was happening in another room in the house.

You can guess what ... by the blur in the picture above.

Yes, it is our 78-year-young bundle of energy - a.k.a. Christa Roesli Eicher (nee Fischer) who just cannot sit still.  Her heart beats with love and her hands live out her heart.

So I was not surprised to walk by the kitchen and see this:


In Mum's methodical way - all the ingredients and implements are ready... for the action to take place.
A few minutes later, the above had been transformed into this:

And another apple pie has been shaped with love, at such a time as this.

Apple pies in the time of cancer.  Apple pies which Dad cannot eat more than a nibble, because all food at this point just turns him off.  It is heart-breaking to bring our tiny offering of food to him, and have him eat a few mouth-fulls, and then get his signal that he has 'had enough.'

The homeopathic doses of food that he is getting these days is not enough to keep him going.  But we are not going to force him.  We cajole and smile and try to edge in another bite or two, but beyond that we let him set the pace on what he wants to eat.

The pies (and there were two of them baked yesterday) are for all of us.  An expression of love.  A statement of homely continuity in times of sorry.  A small extension of the home that Mum has lovingly crafted in the many places and spaces that we have wandered over all these years.

Mum continues to live out the life that her mother Roesli Fischer lived.  A hard-working woman with a big heart ... and who loved to bake.  

As a young girl, Mum would tell her mother to relax and sleep on the odd day that her mother got off from her labour in the coal business (Fischer Brennverstoff in Leipzig) that her husband Willi and her ran.  But instead, she would find her mother in the little allotment plot, gardening.   A whole generation later, Mum continues to live out this drive of love in her life.  Kinetic love.  One pie at a time.