One More Thing, One More Time

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Words that will haunt me forever. The words my mother used when she told me she was going to die. The cancer came back, too aggressive, too much, she is too weak. How she said those words with barely a stutter, without a tear in her eye I will never know.

It wasn’t meant to be now, I hadn’t planned for this, maybe in 30 years time once she had seen my children grow up, once she had seen me or at least one of her children marry. But no, sometimes life throws a curve ball at you that you just couldn’t have seen coming. If someone told me a year ago that on the 23rd of May 2012 I would find out that my mother had less than a month left to live, I wouldn’t have believed them.

It hurts me to know that she will probably never see me start work, but it does comfort me to know she say my elation when I got the job. My kids will never get to know their grandmother and I will have to tell them about how wonderful a person she was and what great things she achived.

Right now she is making a decision, whether to fight or accept it and take death in her stride. If she fights she will be hit by high dose radiation and chemo therapy, killing her bone marrow, her blood cells and her immune system, taking her within an inch of death. The hope being that it would put her back in remission and they could then try a bone marrow transpant to get the bad coding out of her blood that is causing these problems.

I have been told that the chance of this working is somewhere between 1 in 1000 or 1 in 10000. the other 9999 chances end in death. A death where she would have been confined to the hospital for the last month of her life, battling sickness and her own body.

The other choice is to hit her with low level radiation and chemo therapy, this will hopefully (but may not) slow the cancer down. She will be able to come home for the next month, go in to the local hospital for chemo when needed, but the lumps will grow and eventually her body won’t be able to fight. She will die.

I am not sure which option I am leaning towards, I like to think that I fighting is always an option and that God does work in miraculous ways. But I also understand that my mother may be ready to go and doesn’t want to die sick and cold in a hospital. It would give her a chance to say goodbye to people with finality. Either way it is a choice I would hate having to make and that it had to happen to someone so close to me.

I am not scared of death, just sorry that you haven’t been able to do everything you wanted to in life.

…and I need to fix it.

It would however be nice if I knew exactly what I had done wrong. Again this is my fault and I do know how to fix it but i can’t for the life of me work out what words may have come out of my mouth to cause what has transpired. I like to think that I am the piece of straw that breaks a camel’s back, rather than adding to all the other baggage being carried.

This isn’t the first time this has happened between me and this girl over our six year friendship. It is actually kind of a cycle we go through stages of: Friendship, Attraction, Infatuation, Rejection, Separation Period. Well, that is what I go through anyway. There have been some pretty bad times in the past where we haven’t spoken for months on end at a time, pretty sure one time we didn’t speak for about six to nine months.

That isn’t to say I am happy about the current situation, we have a lot of history but also a lot of good times. Where to start with background history. Well in mid August of last year we had been sitting in the friendship stage for about 6 months maybe a tad more after having a long time of not talking to each other. The reason being that she had turned me down saying she wasn’t ready for a relationship, I then went away for a month and a half, came back and she was dating someone. I used to get jealous very easily.

They seemed really happy together and I am slightly sad that I only got to see him in his fall from grace, I am pretty sure he is actually quite a nice guy. But as her life was falling apart I was there for her, to bake rainbow cakes, to hang out when she needed, to give her encouragement and ideas for school work, to communicate of a whiteboard late at night when her ex was being a dick. One of my favourite memories in the recent past is cooking pancakes at 1am.

But things just kept getting worse for you, your friends kicked you out, you got new friends who you aren’t nearly as close to as before. And me, well we stopped seeing each other on a regular basis and you didn’t want the relationship that I wanted, so I went and found someone who did.

I thought you to be happy enough, you had dancing which you seemed to love, you got a boyfriend and then asked my advice on whether you should dump him. I guess I should be happy that we are close enough that you have asked me for relationship advice on a number of your boyfriends, but it irritates me you never gave us as a couple a chance despite the valentines, kind words, good messages everything you seemed to want.

When I said I cared over the past few months I honestly meant it, I have cared for the better part of six years, just you aren’t always one to tell your entire mind to someone, you are to independent for that, I understand, I wouldn’t be able to put school work above my girlfriend no matter what ATAR i needed, you have commitment but it does come at some what of a cost.

I am extremely sorry for what I have done, despite not being 100% sure as to what I have said. I had this post mostly written out before, but tumblr lost it so I had to write it out again, i feel there is a bit more irritation in it this time, not at you but because I had to write it out again. I have told you before we can’t have the relationship that you wanted us to have, it doesn’t work for me but it doesn’t mean I don’t want to be your friend.

I still want to help you, high school sucks, it just does, university is better

I am not sure if in the past I have not been noticing things or if there weren’t many life changing and influential moments in my past, but recently these moments have been coming hard and fast. I think the majority of the people who know me will be aware of what I am talking about. In the past 6 months, my mother was diagnosed with leukaemia, my grandfather had a small stroke type thing and very recently my grandmother died.

With that being said, my mother is now in remission which is good but the death and stroke are still very recent and I am going up to Queensland for the funeral this week.

When I was born I had four grandparents alive, one of my grandfathers died when I was very young and I have no memory of him. My first grandmother was a very active lady, going skydiving at the ripe old age of 72 or something crazy like that, she died the night after coming home from a cruise around some of the world, peaceful I suppose. I didn’t go to her funeral, I had exams or something.

I want to remember the best parts of my grandmother who recently passed away, this may not always be easy. She had arthritis all the time I have memories of her. I remember cooking white Christmas with her and thinking that she didn’t think I was capable mixing the ingredients as she was constantly shaking (I thought this a sign of nervousness or something similar). Unfortunately as I grew up her symptoms got worse, I think she also developed dementia a bit, it was horrible for me to see her degrade, and I can’t imagine how it was for my mother.

I have always seemed very disconnected from death, not even wanting to see our family cat in a rigid post death state. Because of this and also that no one really close to me has died up until 2010 and even then I skipped the funeral, I think there was more to it than exams, mentally, if you know what I mean. But I think I will have to face up to it this time, flights have been booked, I don’t want to see my grandfather at his weakest, lost the woman whom he loved, who he saw degrade, who he cared for and gave up life goals and dreams for, if anything the weakness of my grandmother shows the strength of my grandfather.

My dad seems always the one to break the news to me, normally he does it casually, somehow working in a laugh, I think I will remember those moments for the rest of my life, I wonder who will break the news of my father’s death to me and I wonder if they too will be able to casually laugh afterwards, as if to numb the pain a little.

The reason I bring up this talk of death is to question my own emotions, not once for any of these deaths or tragic events did I shed a tear (not really until writing this a little I must admit). Am I a bad person for not showing emotion here? I have a full emotional range, I am able to laugh jovially, sigh deeply, smile warmly and even in the right circumstance cry softly but never over the death of those close to me.

The death of a fictional character, a touching moment in a movie, or thinking about past days and mourning over things not going the way I had hoped, why can these moments make me cry but people who for without I would not exist my eyes stay dry, I am not sure whether I should be thankful or hateful of my escapes.
What do I believe has made me like this, video games, modern movies and to a lesser extent the books I have read. Games have most defiantly changed the meaning of death for me, I know that death happens and that is irreversible but video games make it happen so regularly, so vividly. I don’t think they have made me violent, no, in the past the want to hurt people with weapons was garnished from other media and maybe a primal instinct.

In a game, you shoot someone, there is a blood splatter on the wall, and you get rewarded, and then run over their body and kill the next person in line, almost conveyor belt style. There is no time to mourn, to question what has happened, what you have caused. I am conditioned to when someone has died, to move on to the next part of life. I am not sure if I should see this as a positive or a negative. I don’t get caught up for extended periods of time over loss of those around me, but if you don’t show emotion at those moments, why do you show it at others? I think it is a serious question that I need to find an answer for.

Movies have affected me in a similar way, but there is much more emotion attached to death in movies (normally), I think action blockbusters where people are dying left right and centre have a similar effect to that of video games but movies like ‘Up’ or some episodes of television shows (e.g. Scrubs) are much more emotional not always depicting death, but tragic moments in people’s lives.

Books are less of a deemotionaliser and much more of an escape with most books that I have read in the past 5 years (bar the twilight saga) connecting death and moments with deep physiological trauma and emotions. I think in a way I am glad that I have a disconnection of sorts, and for that I should be thankful for video games, it makes me worry less about things I can’t change and work hard to change the things I can influence.

When my mother was diagnosed with Leukaemia I was travelling around New Zealand, I got slightly stressed and booked the first flights home I could, my father told me to stay and enjoy myself because “there is nothing you can do here” but really when your mother is critically ill, you want to see her, or at the very least be in the same country as her. So I did come home, paying for moving of flights and what not and saw her about 2 days after I found out (they had been keeping the information away from me for a number of days in the worry I would do exactly what I did).

Arriving in Sydney I was met by my father, who I had Maccas with and then went and visited my mum in hospital. This was the first of 2 or 3 times that I saw my mum in hospital over the 6 month period (she came home on a regular basis) I can’t do sick people, the frailty of it scares me. Slowly it dawned on me that I really couldn’t do anything to help, this has become apparent in many more things since then. The fact that even if I want to help, physically there is nothing I can do; it helped me understand the comfort people find in prayer.

Realising this, I used that week, I went to parties, I started dating my girlfriend, and I will admit that coming home the week early defiantly had its benefits. But still, I can’t do anything about death, I can’t do anything about world poverty, I can’t do anything about other people’s relationships, the only thing I have an exact control over is myself and a slight influence on those around me.

I feel pretty terrible that I visited my mum so little, even now I feel a pang of guilt going out and doing some things like spending money on alcohol, neither one of my parents have been working for the past 6 months, been on sick leave, long service leave, carers leave, leave without pay, there has been money coming in but to a lesser extent and because I don’t earn enough to pay for the things I do and petrol for my car I get money off them when I need it, so that is why I feel bad, as for the not visiting my mum in hospital that is due to me being lazy, my dad spent almost every day for 5 months there with her. /end tangent.

So to end this up, it has been a crazy 6 months, I don’t even know where the time is going, that pesky middle number on the date just keeps on changing, soon I will be working full time, soon I will be 19. I wonder if this much has always been happening in my life and I have been too ignorant to notice or if I have just been really lucky over the years. Maybe I have been caught up in my escapes, trying to stay away from the harsh world; maybe my lack of emotion is just a showing of a strong resilience to life.

Rest In Peace Grandma

msgendry:

do you ever just grab your boobs because boobs

(Source: mrsromanoff)