Complications.

There is periodic arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat) along with new pneumonia, in my father's ongoing chemo. The chronic diarrhea that I mentioned is from some kind of radiation burn (which would suck anyway, but I think with colon cancer it sucks a bit more pointedly), which has had him on fluids all month, and he's (predictably) weaker from that, and everyone's been anxious about how/if he'll get through surgery, but the chemo goes on hold when arrhythmia appears, and i think it'll also be on hold for the pneumonia now.

My brother in a phone call this afternoon said, "It's starting to look like a stacking set of complications, and, you know, you may want to reconsider your travel plans."

My current travel plans are to go out there FRIDAY.

I'm ready for a perhaps-shockingly weakened character, and I know better than to wish for anything. With mortality you take as high a dose of Buddhism as you can handle.

It feels like "inhale, pinch nose and drop into the water" but that's the selfish way, the ego-defending way, insensitive, guarded. You go generous, giving whatever energy anyone needs, to anyone who needs it. Living in the strength of the past, the storytelling.

He said to me, many many times while I was growing up, "You put me in the ground, and then you throw a party!" He always hated the morbidity of so many Catholic funerals, but as so many, wouldn't give up the faith for that one complaint.

A party it is, no matter what sorts of hell we go through to get to it.