(no subject)
Jun. 2nd, 2003 01:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thejunipertreeI don't know what I want to say. Watching Six Feet Under probably doesn't help my state of mind any right now. The show revolves around death.
Death, yes. Something which I am normally very comfortable speaking about. I've seen more death in my twenty eight years then a lot of people don't see in their entire lifetimes. I've had friends die, more than I can count. Relatives. An ex-lover. I've seen it up close and I've seen it from far away. I know suicides, car accidents, illlness, murder. There isn't very much that I haven't had to deal with yet.
Other then the death of a parent.
And every day that looms closer and closer.
The other night, more like a couple of weeks ago, I was talking to Carrie online about my mother's sickness. And about how I was scared. I asked that in the event of The Big Bad (tm), would she come East to help me through it. She would, and had apparently already decided this beforehand with no plea from me. I love her for this, among other things.
However, that night I also started looking around online about the statistics of living through Stage Four colon cancer. The likelihood of my mother surviving this black and nasty thing, gnawing away at her insides like a four year old boy chomping on a candy cane.
Some say 3%. Others give a 5% chance.
This hit it home for me. I swung my Louieville slugger and it struck with a sickening *thwap!*
My mother is going to...
I can't say it yet. I can't bring myself to say it. If I say it, it's going to make it a truth. Saying words breathes life into them. I can't breathe life into this word because by doing so I'll sentence her to death. And I can't do that. I can't.
A year ago, I choose a profession to pursue that is intimately involved with death. It thrives off it. I find the idea of being a mortician attractive. Thinking of myself in that line of work brings me a peace that I've never felt before in my entire life. A fine and quiet place.
Embalming is an artform. It is a ritual that used to be held quite highly. Ancient Egyptian embalmers were seen as akin to priests. They readied your body for the next life. I want to be the caretaker, to be the person who prepares someone for their next step. That big and final step into the unknown. I want to be the priest who holds someone's hand before they embark on that journey.
That sounds stupid to me, but it's how I feel.
I've always pursued the unknown, despite the fact that it is one of the few things that truly terrify me. I've chased it relentlessly. No one has ever held my hand for any of the times when I've closed my eyes and jumped.
I want to give what I never had.
With all of this knowledge in my brain, you would think that I was perfectly at ease with the idea of my mother shuffling off this mortal coil. But, I'm not.
I want to scream. And break things. I've said this all before.
It is a sharp fucking knife stuck right through my chest when I think about living life without her, or my father for that matter. How do people deal with this? How did they deal with it? Both of my parents lost both of their parents. My father lost his father when I was very young, so I don't have much knowledge of how he dealt with it. Though my mother told me that he tried to throw himself into the grave at the burial service. My mom lost her father when I was slightly older and I wasn't exposed, purposely, to the messier side of things that involved that. I was in my early, early twenties when my maternal grandmother died. But, she had been dead for so long that it wasn't much of a shock or a trauma to be handled. I didn't cry. I felt empty. When Dorothea died almost two years ago, my father's mother, I was right in the middle of it all. I held her hand as she lie in a hospital bed, hooked up to machines and doped up on morphine. I told her it was time to go, to stop worrying about the rest of us. I watched my father cry. I went to him in the middle of the night when I got the call. I told him he could talk to me whenever he needed to, but he didn't.
So, how did they /deal/ with it?
How does anyone deal with it?
I'll go for hours, days, without thinking about what's coming. I drift through work and hanging out with my friends and schmucking around the house without noticing the black cloud looming on the horizon. And then it'll hit me, suddenly. Bam. It's going to happen. I watch her struggle with the stupid chemo infusion unit that she has hooked up to her port. She named it Henry and calls it her boyfriend. I helped her untangle it the other day, while we were at the bank, and accidentially tugged on the tube. I watched the pain flit through her face as it pulled on the port needle stuck through her vein. I see her force herself to eat. I stand in back of her in the store and notice how small her shoulders seem to me, how fragile they look.
When did my mother become fragile? She's always been like me, a hellraiser. When did she become a glass doll? She looks so tiny now, like she's shrunk.
I'm not supposed to be dealing with this at this age. I'm not even thirty, for fuck's sake. I'm supposed to be older. She's supposed to be older. I wanted her around as a cantankerous old woman with too many cats and a lines on her face from life and experience. My mother barely has any lines on her face, just around her eyes. She's not even sixty and she doesn't even come close to looking her age.
And to tell you the truth, it's not even the idea of losing her that I'm afraid of. It's the idea of what's going to happen afterwards. How I'm going to handle it. What's going to go on. If I'm going to lose my shit. How badly I'll want to claw out my oldest brother's eyes and my kick my uncle, her brother, in the throat. I'm afraid of everything that could potentially happen after she goes.
There's the unknown again. But this time, it's not the kind I'm pursuing.
Who can hold my hand through something like this?
I have my friends to lean on, but really...that can only go so far without me exhausting their own resources. I can't rely on anybody for this, but myself.
And I'm not entirely sure I can even rely on myself.
I feel like an ass, writing all of this. Like some sympathy begging stupid fuck. But Christ! What am I supposed to /do?/
Death, yes. Something which I am normally very comfortable speaking about. I've seen more death in my twenty eight years then a lot of people don't see in their entire lifetimes. I've had friends die, more than I can count. Relatives. An ex-lover. I've seen it up close and I've seen it from far away. I know suicides, car accidents, illlness, murder. There isn't very much that I haven't had to deal with yet.
Other then the death of a parent.
And every day that looms closer and closer.
The other night, more like a couple of weeks ago, I was talking to Carrie online about my mother's sickness. And about how I was scared. I asked that in the event of The Big Bad (tm), would she come East to help me through it. She would, and had apparently already decided this beforehand with no plea from me. I love her for this, among other things.
However, that night I also started looking around online about the statistics of living through Stage Four colon cancer. The likelihood of my mother surviving this black and nasty thing, gnawing away at her insides like a four year old boy chomping on a candy cane.
Some say 3%. Others give a 5% chance.
This hit it home for me. I swung my Louieville slugger and it struck with a sickening *thwap!*
My mother is going to...
I can't say it yet. I can't bring myself to say it. If I say it, it's going to make it a truth. Saying words breathes life into them. I can't breathe life into this word because by doing so I'll sentence her to death. And I can't do that. I can't.
A year ago, I choose a profession to pursue that is intimately involved with death. It thrives off it. I find the idea of being a mortician attractive. Thinking of myself in that line of work brings me a peace that I've never felt before in my entire life. A fine and quiet place.
Embalming is an artform. It is a ritual that used to be held quite highly. Ancient Egyptian embalmers were seen as akin to priests. They readied your body for the next life. I want to be the caretaker, to be the person who prepares someone for their next step. That big and final step into the unknown. I want to be the priest who holds someone's hand before they embark on that journey.
That sounds stupid to me, but it's how I feel.
I've always pursued the unknown, despite the fact that it is one of the few things that truly terrify me. I've chased it relentlessly. No one has ever held my hand for any of the times when I've closed my eyes and jumped.
I want to give what I never had.
With all of this knowledge in my brain, you would think that I was perfectly at ease with the idea of my mother shuffling off this mortal coil. But, I'm not.
I want to scream. And break things. I've said this all before.
It is a sharp fucking knife stuck right through my chest when I think about living life without her, or my father for that matter. How do people deal with this? How did they deal with it? Both of my parents lost both of their parents. My father lost his father when I was very young, so I don't have much knowledge of how he dealt with it. Though my mother told me that he tried to throw himself into the grave at the burial service. My mom lost her father when I was slightly older and I wasn't exposed, purposely, to the messier side of things that involved that. I was in my early, early twenties when my maternal grandmother died. But, she had been dead for so long that it wasn't much of a shock or a trauma to be handled. I didn't cry. I felt empty. When Dorothea died almost two years ago, my father's mother, I was right in the middle of it all. I held her hand as she lie in a hospital bed, hooked up to machines and doped up on morphine. I told her it was time to go, to stop worrying about the rest of us. I watched my father cry. I went to him in the middle of the night when I got the call. I told him he could talk to me whenever he needed to, but he didn't.
So, how did they /deal/ with it?
How does anyone deal with it?
I'll go for hours, days, without thinking about what's coming. I drift through work and hanging out with my friends and schmucking around the house without noticing the black cloud looming on the horizon. And then it'll hit me, suddenly. Bam. It's going to happen. I watch her struggle with the stupid chemo infusion unit that she has hooked up to her port. She named it Henry and calls it her boyfriend. I helped her untangle it the other day, while we were at the bank, and accidentially tugged on the tube. I watched the pain flit through her face as it pulled on the port needle stuck through her vein. I see her force herself to eat. I stand in back of her in the store and notice how small her shoulders seem to me, how fragile they look.
When did my mother become fragile? She's always been like me, a hellraiser. When did she become a glass doll? She looks so tiny now, like she's shrunk.
I'm not supposed to be dealing with this at this age. I'm not even thirty, for fuck's sake. I'm supposed to be older. She's supposed to be older. I wanted her around as a cantankerous old woman with too many cats and a lines on her face from life and experience. My mother barely has any lines on her face, just around her eyes. She's not even sixty and she doesn't even come close to looking her age.
And to tell you the truth, it's not even the idea of losing her that I'm afraid of. It's the idea of what's going to happen afterwards. How I'm going to handle it. What's going to go on. If I'm going to lose my shit. How badly I'll want to claw out my oldest brother's eyes and my kick my uncle, her brother, in the throat. I'm afraid of everything that could potentially happen after she goes.
There's the unknown again. But this time, it's not the kind I'm pursuing.
Who can hold my hand through something like this?
I have my friends to lean on, but really...that can only go so far without me exhausting their own resources. I can't rely on anybody for this, but myself.
And I'm not entirely sure I can even rely on myself.
I feel like an ass, writing all of this. Like some sympathy begging stupid fuck. But Christ! What am I supposed to /do?/
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(no subject)
Date: 2003-06-01 11:12 pm (UTC)I've been thru it, and I have come out the other side...not unscathed, but not completely broken either.
I don't want anyone to ever feel the way I did.
I don't think you want to re-read my shit about my father right now, but it's there in the memory file. That's how I dealt with it. I wrote & cried & tried to dig myself out of this fucking hole.
If there's anything I can do, let me know. Yeah, you have to rely on yourself for this...but you can't carry it all alone all the time.
love to you, my dear.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-06-02 12:03 am (UTC)The big D is hard for anyone.. it is like anything in life.. when you see it happening around you in a non personal form, it doesn't have the effect that it would if it is right there in front of you.
and sadly it is right in front of you.. and it IS personal. It is not a complete stranger, or someone you hardly know. and it isn't like you do not see her every day. It is okay to be sad and it is okay to be angry and it is okay to feel however you are feeling. It is not your time to be the comforting shoulder... It is time for you to need that... and that is why most of us are here in our own little way. Your mom has always been a fighter.. I don't care how small the odds are.. there is always a chance.. and that to me is enough hope to have.
No matter what happens here.. You are strong.. and you are going to be strong. And If nothing else.. whatever the outcome.. I am sure it will definately help you deal with people when you get into your chosen profession.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-06-02 12:27 am (UTC)I guess you're supposed to... feel everything, but no guilt for your anger and rage and weakness. I could type out everything my psychology professor spoke of when he lectured on death & dying, but it's only an instruction book...
It's a time when you do not have to apologize for yourself and your feelings, actions. You're supposed to lean on whoever has the strength to support you. You're supposed to cry and swear and scream and kick concrete walls. You're supposed to do everything you have to to be happy again. You're supposed to have lunches and suppers and drink coffee and smoke, you're supposed to have friends over to visit. You're supposed to accept the help and goodwill of those who care. You're supposed to grow closer to your family through the tragedy. You're supposed to not know what to do. You're supposed to take a renewed interest in your health and the maintenance thereof. You're supposed to take walks and pick flowers and "give them to her".
I think.
But you're definitely supposed to come to us when you need us, and not worry about sounding weak or needy. Because part of you is weakened by this tragedy, and a big part of you is needy because you are in crisis. That's what your loved ones are for. If not that, then nothing.
Words are nothing, though. If I were there, which I am regretfully not, I'd curl up to you and pet your hair until you fell asleep. And hug you all night long, if you wanted.
But, I will be there. For you, and for your mother's peace of mind. I love you so much that words will always fail me.
Dealing, and such
Date: 2003-06-02 04:19 am (UTC)As for dealing, I can't even say. When my grandmother passed, I didn't really deal, so much as carry on out of necessity. Your life doesn't stop, and all the basic things you do, you still do, just with a heavier heart and a lot of tears [at least that's how it was for me.] I was a wreck for a while, though, and really, really needed people to lean on through the wake/funeral. It was hard. And I wanted to eviscerate relatives who poured out of the woodwork and acted as if they were as affected as I was [and didn't watch her fade away into weakness, due to cancer], and I wanted to scream, just an endless, horror movie scream at the priest, going on as if he knew her. Telling little stories. It was all wrong.
[Actually, I was so bothered by the priest talking about her at the wake, the morning of the funeral, I scribbled what I thought should be said on a napkin. I handed it to my mother, and told her this was what had to be said, because it was the truth, as told by someone who saw her almost every day of her life. We gave it to the priest, who read it. That made me feel somewhat better.]
The thing is, I still feel an acute sense of loss. I've dreamt of her, and woke up crying. But deal? It's not active, I don't think. It's passive. It just happens. You go to bed at night, and wake up again in the morning, and live as best you can because you know that's what she'd have wanted. I think you'll feel the same way... there's a strange sense that comes along with it all. Peace, I suppose, even for you. Because the cancer is so hard to watch.
Ugh. I am probably not helping.
If you need anything... email, aim, or call.
*hug*
(no subject)
Date: 2003-06-02 05:47 am (UTC)In about two years I face this very real possibility. I push it from my view so I don't have to think about it. Ignore something and it will go away. Mature eh?
I think some of it becomes auto pilot. Some of it is taken care of by friends. Some of it just comes in time. A pretty good picture was painted by John Belushi's wife in the book Samurai Widow. I'd be happy to lend it to you if you wanted to read it.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-06-02 06:34 am (UTC)Again I wish I could say something wise or witty or even vaguely soothing but I can't. All I can say is my heart is to you in this time.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-06-02 07:26 am (UTC)i don't know what to say
even if hope is small, it's still there.
find comfort in that. pray alot. i do.
i love you.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-06-02 09:50 am (UTC)You're entitled.
How does anyone deal with it?
From what I've seen of the way Dee dealt with, and deals with, the passing of her parents... a lot of it was the passing of time.
Not that the loss is any less. But the hurt is.
Friends and family make a difference, too.
Be well.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-06-03 06:25 pm (UTC)