Bone cancer, she says, they think it might be bone cancer. The diagnosis - degenerative bone disease, but only because they can not get far enough into his lungs to tap cells, to remove fluid to see if it's cancer.

Degenerative bone disease, brittle bones, bones made brittle perhaps by years of anti-psychotic medicine sucking nutrients out of tissue, out of bone, out of flesh. They say he had a brittle mind, a fragile mind, easily broken. I sit here at 43, trying to break down the constructs of my mind, my ego; it is not an easy thing.

I read yesterday of an artist whose daughter was schizophrenic, he takes her from psychiatrist to psychiatrist wanting one to say, " She is genius like you, not schizophrenic." Finally one says to him "She is falling, you are climbing, that is the difference." I read that and it stays, but I wonder. Climbing seems the sign of madness, trying to escape, leave, flee. Falling is to surrender, to embrace not deny. Who is mad?

They say he had a fragile mind, a brittle mind. I see brittle fingernails, white spots, sign of a lack of calcium. Milk rich with calcium. He had no mother. And I am not blaming his mother, or lack of mothering. Milk. I think now of allergies. I heard we crave the very thing we are allergic to. We are addicted to reaction.

Brittle nails, I see his beautiful delicate hands with long dirty nicotine stained fingers. His sister had the same nails, though her hands were much smaller. He is six foot two, she five foot two, and I stand half way in between. It is as if we are holding hands in a fragile, brittle chain.

Brittle bones. My joints have been aching, like growing pains. I am growing again. At 43, I would have thought my bones were set. His are breaking or at least being eaten up from the inside out. What is inside a bone? Are they being eaten up from the inside out or the outside in?

They used to call the body, bone house. It is a fragile thing, this thing we call body. Held together so loosely. This delicateness of bones, really are anyone's strong enough to hold all of this up? This breath, this blood, these memories, senses, this electrical network of currents and pulses and signals? Brittle bones, fragile mind.

I think of the currents of electricity, shock treatments coursing through his temples into his brain, through his body splayed out like the limbs of an uprooted tree. Electricity producing seizures, a piece of rubber in his mouth to protect his tongue from being bitten in two. But isn't that what got him here in the first place, having two tongues? One that spoke words it was okay to speak, and the tongue that pronounced his fragile truth?

Truth is a fragile, brittle thing. Truth seeps into your bones and joints and makes them ache, yearn to speak it, to be known, to be raw as bone. Bone rubs against bone and wears one away. Degenerative bone disease, bone cancer, the root of the structure collapsing.

He lost all this teeth at 18, gums malnourished, eaten away, teeth loosening from their sockets. The man was never held together very tightly, the man was crying to be nourished and it seemed no nourishment ever came. But what do I know of nourishment? Mouth open, like tiny baby birds, we seek life, we seek flight.

I see a rubber pacifier and though I know it is not the same shape as the rubber put into his mouth to stop him from biting his tongue in two, I see him resisting pacification until the very last second. What of this need to pacify, to erase rage, speaking of anger, of truth?

There is no cancer in his blood stream. How could his blood be running pure, I wonder? I am no doctor. I do not understand how bones eat themselves, or why one cell turns enemy, turns stranger. What starts any reaction, I do not know. Brittle bones, bones trying desperately to suck life in from cells, from blood, food, from any substance that happens to pass them.

Degenerative, the passing of a generation. I will not pass my genes on. Degenerative, brittle bones, brittle fragile family tree. We carry within us like an x-ray, faint traces of our roots. We grow away from the seeds that planted us, but like trees we are growing deeper into the soil at the same time we are growing away.

Degenerative. Nutrients are leeched from the soil when the same crop is planted over and over again. And these same thoughts keep running through my brain, of him, of his madness, of his mother's madness, his fathers drinking, his sisters ...

Degenerative, at some point the degeneration can stop. Can be turned around and the regeneration can start, but we forget that and we go over and over and over the same paths until they become ruts.

We sink so far down, we can not imagine rising. The psychiatrist said the difference between you and she is that you are climbing and she is falling. Is that what he meant?

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