Death, Dog, and Taxes

After unsuccessfully trying to explain to my husband why he really does in fact want to drive fourteen hundred miles to BrokenArrow, Oklahoma, for Thanksgiving, in our not overly large car with the dog and a wife who once managed to leave the entire state of Texas off an itinerary to which it rightfully belonged, he was able to pull the trump card of, well, employment. (And no, this was not an excuse. My husband likes my family, in a Margaret Mead/Noam Chompsky sort of way).

And so because in the estimation of United Airlines, the dog does not fit under the seat in front of us, and because we waited too long to use one of the three boarders who are recommended by friends just as neurotic about their animals, we are spending Thanksgiving alone. Well, not technically alone, but it will be the first Thanksgiving I have not spent with my parents. I have tried to forget the one last year, when my mother couldn’t eat anything, not even strawberry Ensure, when I caught her halving her Xeloda dosage, because half of the chemotherapy regimen, she reasoned, would be better than no regimen at all. I still have somewhere the phone that I broke, very intentionally, on the tile of my kitchen floor. An interesting fact: there is a California misdemeanor code that addresses the intentional destruction of an electronic telecommunication device, geared, no doubt, to situations in which one is calling for help, not necessarily where one is calling their sister in Chicago, warm and removed from the craziness at hand, for help of a different sort. After that, I took Family Medical Leave, and watched my mother take the prescribed dose of her chemotherapy. And mercifully, I’ve almost forgotten about the pale green plastic tray with the Thanksgiving dinner in the palliative care unit, where my father was staying at the time. There is nothing more soul smothering than institutional holiday food.

So in light of the memories of yesteryear, I suggested to my husband that we take the time to go somewhere else, a neutral place with no memories of Thanksgivings past, a brand new rat cage in lab parlance, but that was gently vetoed, too. That’s because my husband is starting a consulting business next year and needs time to put certain things in order, which is actually a great thing, for about ten thousand mind numbing reasons that I’m not going to go into, but the upshot is that it makes infinitely better sense to do IVF after January 1, in the next tax year. And actually, the clinic we are going to use closes for two weeks in December to do something to the embryology lab- clean it, recalibrate the instruments, I don’t like to think too much about the details and the variables regarding what might not correctly put back together, and I’m too superstitious to schedule something immediately before or right after, so….fine by me.