January 28, 2011
I'm unhappy. I'm stressed. I'm
guilty for taking the time to write this instead of being at work, doing
homework, or being with my mom. I'm also kind of empty and numb. I don't WANT
to feel this, I really don't. My chest feels tight all the time, and the tears
are always just under the surface. If I lose my composition for even a second,
I know they will come rushing out like a cascade of water breaking through a
dam. And just like that, I will be powerless to STOP the tears until there is
not any more water left. This is what happened the first time I let myself cry
over this. It was awful. We had been drinking, my friends and I, and when I
knew I could retreat into my room without anyone caring I did. And I cried and
cried and cried for HOURS straight. There was no break in my crying. I took
sleeping pills during this hysteria so I could pass the fuck out and after a
few hours I finally did. One minute I was blowing my nose and wiping tears and
crying and next thing I knew it was several hours later and I was waking up on
a still-wet pillow with the tissue in my hand. Needless to say I felt awful and
don't ever want to repeat that ever again. So that is why I have to repress
this thing that's in my chest. It almost feels like it's a little dragon in
there, and it started out as a vaguely uncomfortable little dragon egg that I
could ignore but now he's hatched, and every day that I don't completely lose
my shit it gets bigger and stronger, and now he has claws and is scratching at
my chest from inside, and every now and then he breathes fire, because he
recently learned how to do that. In fact, I
know EXACTLY when this dragon learned to breath fire. It was the day I
decided to do more research on the internet to "make myself feel
better" about my mom's cancer. It
was also the day I discovered the number sixteen. Sixteen percent survival rate
after five years, that is, for stage 4 breast cancer.
Five
years. In five years I will be twenty four years old. That is WAY TOO FUCKING
YOUNG to have an 84 percent chance of not having my mom around. I know, I know
worse things have happened to other people. Some people never get to know their
parents, or their parents die suddenly in a freak accident when the kids are
young. There are natural disasters and poverty and wars. I honestly don't know
how the world isn't a more fucked up place than it is, considering all the
horrible things the majority of the world's population is subjected to on a
daily basis. I can't even imagine. But then again, I could never imagine one of
my parents getting cancer, either.
Most
of the people my age I know have never experienced death. Sure, they had a pet
die. Or maybe a distant relative, or a grandparent died when they were little.
Some kid they saw once in the hall at school died in a car crash. That is not
what I am talking about. Those people might think, "Oh, I've experienced a
death and it isn't as terrible as some people make it out to be." It's so
much worse. I lost my grandmother when I was 7. We saw her every day, and the
last few weeks she was alive she was living in my house. So yes, I knew her and
was close to her. Was I super upset? No. As a child, death isn't that terrible.
I didn't grasp the PERMANENCE of it, nor had I yet started to question whether
people go to " a better place" or whether I would ever see my grandma
again. I KNEW I would see her again, I didn't see why everyone was so sad if she
was somewhere better than here, having a ball. When I was in maybe 8th grade an
uncle died. Again, we weren't that close. This time, I was very, very sad that
he left behind a little boy, and my cousin was absolutely HEARTBROKEN at losing
her husband to cancer so young. I cried at that funeral, and I was genuinely
very upset for my young widowed cousin. But again, I wasn't in mourning. It was
sad, but I could leave the funeral and return to my life and not be consumed by
it. I thought I understood death then. Sadly, my cousin was the one who got
that horrible understanding then. She couldn't just "leave the funeral".
Then
Austin died. The grief was all consuming for a very long time. I spent months
crying at night. Our lives are irreparably changed because of his death. My
family, his family, completely changed. There will ALWAYS be a piece missing.
It is still so hard to think about and I still cry. The crying is a lot more
spread out now. Usually something triggers it, or on New Years I don't know but
I was just hysterically crying about it. Heavy drinking triggers it too,
apparently. So it doesn't ever go away. It never will. Eventually during the
grief you just accept that this is always going to hurt and that you can't fix
it and that you can't give up on the rest of your life. The show must go on. The
whole process is so long and exhausting and fucking sadder than anything I had
ever known before. Before Austin died, when I read a book and someone died I
would get sad and think "oh that would be so sad". Now when I read a
book and someone dies I start bawling, because I know. It's one of those
feelings that you absolutely cannot imagine no matter how hard you try until it
actually happens. Then, no matter how hard you try, you can never forget. It's
kind of like being in love in that way I guess. You don't really know what it's
like, no matter how many romance novels you read as a tween or whatever, until
you actually fall in love.
So having the experience of death in my
repertoire of memories is not helping me in the least right now. It's not one
of those things that will become easier because I already went through it once.
Nope. Now that I know... the remote prospect of losing my mom is so much more
horrible and breath stopping than I ever could have imagined when I was
younger. The whole process...of
grieving...is SO EXHAUSTING. It takes a part of your soul and keeps it forever and
ever. Not only that, I think of how many things would trigger a hysterical
crying fit for my mom, and it's basically anything imaginable would trigger
one. I feel like I am staring up at a mountain. A mountain on Jupiter. And I
know that somehow I have to get up that mountain and to the other side, and I
can't turn back because there is suddenly a moat full of alligators cutting me
off from my old life, and I can't just sit at the base of the mountain and
carve out a life there, because there's a group of orcs hunting me. So,
somehow, someway, I have to get over that impossible mountain that doesn't even
EXIST on earth, because if I don't climb it I will die, but getting up the
mountain might kill me too because I'm
not a fucking mountain climber and I didn't even bring any water. Fuck. Oh yeah, and I've never been to Jupiter so
just breathing is a huge hurdle at this point, not even taking into account the
orcs and the poisonous mote.
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