Lurking

Long ago (last year) I blogged just about every day...sometimes more than that. I've fallen off a lot lately, and I'm not exactly sure why. I'm busy, yes, with work and a daughter with whom I want to spend just about every free minute I have. But there might be more to it than that. I'm having a hard time keeping up with my end of the conversation. I may even have forgotten what I'm talking about midstride. This started as a way to record Clementine's life and mine as we struggled to know one another, and it quickly became a way for me to reach a small community of like-minded or curious parents who happened by. I have no aims to be a superblogger like the tiresome parent who once told he was working hard "to build the readership" of his blog, and sometimes I wonder why I keep it up.

Why am I thinking about blogging like this? Nate might say it's my nature to overanalyze, but in fact I have been lurking on a blog kept by a senior at the high school where I work and it consumes a great deal of my attention and energy. Out of context that sounds creepy, but everyone on campus is as obsessed or more than I am, whether she is his English teacher or a student who has never met him. He is dying--and I think at this point that's a fair statement--of an agressive form of pediatric cancer. He and his family started his "Care Page," a blog program for cancer patients, at the beginning of his struggle with cancer as a way of keeping people updated on treatments, outcomes, tests. It has now become a way for the family to keep a public record of the day-to-day life of a cancer patient nearing the end of the battle, but it's so much more. It's a mediatation of life and death; it is the most eloquent account I've read of someone so young looking right into the face of death and having presence of mind enough to talk about it. A lot. To say the things he wants to the world before he goes. And as the bulletin boards on the page grow by the hour with comments from fellow students, teachers, strangers, it also becomes a testament to how a community can care, how it can learn from the people within it. I'm not nearly as eloquent as the 18-year-old in the center of the Care Page when talking about it, and I can hardly even log on these days without dissolving into tears.

And with those cheerful thoughts I leave you. Clementine is just up from her nap and is shaking like a leaf. She has been fevered, freezing and puking in the last 24 hours, and I'm going to go cuddle her and maybe give in to her relentless demands for dancey dancing (see below) and Oz.