On August 6th it was 20 months since Maxx died. I don't want to begin this blog with the history of what happened. I don't know how I want to begin. I don't even like the idea of blogging, telling anyone who happens to find this, how I feel...about anything. It feels wrong. I am a very private, solitary person. I am of another generation, born in 1952. The public sharing of self that has come to define the culture in the past 20 years is not an activity, a persona, with which I am comfortable. I have written about the death of my son in a journal of sorts. Not often, or regularly, but I have put my pain into words.

And though this public forum feels and seems alien to me, I admit that I have searched endlessly in my grief for similar stories of the deaths of young adults from cancer. I have found many, but Maxx's case was so unusual, induced by the immunosuppresive drugs he was taking to keep his Ulcerative Colitis in remission, that there are no other stories anywhere that seem to touch all these unimaginable, unbelievable slipping down circumstances that piled, one upon the other, as we all tumbled headlong into his grave. He was strong, his chronic IBD was under control, he was set to begin his senior year in college. Otherwise healthy, athletic, intelligent, funny, kind, he was diagnosed as a result of feeling unwell for about a month, on July 13th, 2007. He died 5 months later on December 6th of Hepatosplenic T-Cell Lymphoma, Stage IV at the age of 21. Seventeen weeks of horrific decline after 20 beautiful years filled with the joy of his presence, hope and excitement about his future. Gone. Extinguished. Perhaps 30 other people in the entire United States have died of this disease as a direct result of the same recombinant medical protocol with which Maxx was treated.

There is no one who has lost a child to cancer who does not suffer the agonies of the damned. It does not end. It changes a bit here and there, the context in which the destruction of a life (his and ours) manifests, evolves. But it is forever. Perhaps I have something to share, perhaps I don't. This month, our old family birthday month (myself, my daugher and Maxx) feels so brutally empty. Last year, though we felt stricken, remains a haze. This second year brings with it deeper nuances in the landscape of finality. I wanted to mark it, somehow. This was how I chose to do so.