I finally have a few minutes to come up for air, but not enough time to really take stock of the last month or even the last year. I think that assessment will have to wait a few more weeks until some of my work dies down.

It’s sort of funny starting the year off on deadline. On New Year’s Eve I said to someone, “I’m not ready for 2012. I haven’t put 2011 properly to bed!” and it still feels that way. I am really enjoying this book project, though -- every time I figure out how to resolve a text-fit problem, I have to get really cozy with the material and I love everything that I’m learning as I scan the paragraphs. There are tons of great images, too, and I like being on the inside, knowing all the details of the book before it’s even made it to the printer’s. Sometimes I wish I were hired to design these types of books outright, sometimes I think it’s better to bat cleanup.

After all, I’m the plastic surgeon who’s always called in to fix the bad nose job. That’s just who I am at this point in my career.

My visit to SF went as well as it could have, meaning I saw my sister every day that I was there. Which was the point. TA and I took her to a doctor’s appointment, we took her out for coffee and lunch, we drove her to the mall so she could do some shopping... we just spent time together, talking and laughing. My goal was to distract her and make her feel loved and normal, to offer her outings that had nothing to do with fear or death or being sick. The apartment she lives in felt sheathed in darkness and heaviness and Jesus Christ, and it made me profoundly sad that that’s her environment. I mean at this stage in her prognosis, no amount of Feng Shui or Design on a Dime is going to make her mortality any less horrifying but I can’t help feeling that with more light, more brightness, more laughter, more friendship, she’d feel less terrified.

Her husband is as awkwardly brutish as ever, out of his depth and overwhelmed but doing his best to take care of her. Even though I have compassion for him and what he’s going through, I still can’t forgive him for being a jackass.

My sister’s daughter on the other hand is insanely adorable. Almost exactly like my sister was at that age: friendly, chatty, open, funny. I hope she is ok and not suffering. You can’t shield a five year old from reality, no matter how hard you try. And she has to know that her mother is not like the other mothers. At five, I felt every one of my parents’ arguments in my bones. I was not immune.

Emotionally, I was fine up until the last day. It was as though I’d been holding my breath from the moment we landed in San Francisco to the moment I got on the plane heading back to New York. I cried a little bit on the flight, thinking about how sad it is that my sister, someone who used to handspring and swan dive into life, is now just circling the tiniest of fish bowls.