What's Love Got to do with it?

Tonight we went out to dinner for Valentine's Day, and while I know that you proably did just the same, in some fashion, this was the first for us in a long damned time.  Because seven years ago, just after midnight on Valentines Day, we got a phone call.  The twins had been put in the NICU a few days before, because Fuzzy, who was very much, even then, quite fuzzy, caught something  icky from his petrie dish older brother and cousin., and he was stable...but then we got that phone call.  We should get to the NICU, they said.  Fuzzy had been intubated to help him breathe, and they just... didn't... know...
I asked to speak to the doctor, who wanted to know if we'd previously lost any children or if we were first cousins.  Yes, indeed, it would seem that we did need to get to the NICU.

How harsh, to bring home big strapping twin boys, only to return them days later, with no guarantees. 

And we went, so early on that Valentine's Day, and we sat by Fuzzy's incubator and I held his tiny, so tiny baby-hand and I must have seemed even more clueless than most parents who might find themselves in the NICU in the middle of the night, because the nurses eventually and very gently suggested that it would be good if I sang to my son.  So I did.  I sang hymns and bits and shreds of lullabyes, but my set was mostly Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard, with a good bit of John Denver thrown in.  It was all I knew.  All the songs of my childhood, hymns and hard drinking country, I sang them all.  

It was endless and horrid.  We slept in shifts on sofa cushions in the waiting area.  We fielded calls.  We checked on Big Boy.  We prayed.  I cried.  My husband kept hold of me, always, always, he kept hold.

My Fuzzy is seven now.  Brilliant and funny and insightful and, well, fuzzy.  Dodged that bullet, sure, but until tonight, I did not acknowledge this holiday because it was the day I almost lost my son.

Now, this Valentine's Day, it is my brother, who hangs in the balance.    Before he had his first chemo today, he went to all his jobsites and collected  his tools, and that simple, practical gesture, says quite a bit  more than I can without falling apart. 

I sat across from my husband tonight, like a million other wives.  We shared a meal and we shared words of devotion and love.   But I wept--(so not a turn on, by the way).   Seems that this isn't a great holiday for us.  Not so much about love,  but about loving and losing, or almost losing, or eventually and always losing. 

And Fuzzy?  He is named for my brother. Interesting, no?   He carries my brother's name with all his seven year old pride, just as we'd hoped.  I want him to carry it, yes, but God, it seems  that now he'll be carrying it on. And that is so not what we'd hoped.  

Sometimes, more often lately,  I wonder why we even bother with hope.

And I am just as lost and useless tonight as I was seven years ago.  My brother needs so much more than my raggedy  version of "Mama Tried" and "Ring of Fire."  This I know. 

I can't do this.  So many hearts on Valentine's Day.  Everywhere.  Paper, Candy, Crayon.  Red, Pink, Rose, Lavendar.  So many hearts in so many places on this one day, then why is mine twice so broken?