Topic: Life
I believe it is a mockery to say that all women have a corner in the market of being able to openly talk about their feelings. At the very least, it is untrue in my case. When it comes to grief, I have never been good at participating in an open dialogue about it, and I absolutely dispise crying in front of other people be they strangers or close friends.
I have just found out that my Aunt Carol, who after years of battling cancer, has finally passed away. She was a funny, vivacious woman who never seemed capable of not smiling, and I admired her a great deal. She was the kind of woman that never seemed to show her age, and always to me seemed younger than her years could ever prove. She was the kind of adult that when I was a teenager, I didn't mind hanging out with.
But, I am not a teenager anymore. I'm 41 with a teenager of my own and now find myself tackling the emotions of anger and feelings of loss that, unfortunately, always accompanies grief.
Death. We fear it, we fear it will take the ones we love most, yet it is an inarguable inevitability. We fear talking about it, that somehow the discussion alone might make others view us as morose or morbid.
Take for example our fascination, as a culture, with vampires. We romanticize the idea of them, because they have immortality. Death never claims them. Forever young, they conquer time and history to take one lover after the other, like some dark fairytale. But life is rarely a fairytale. If anything it is a short story with a predictable end.
Yes, I know I am rambling. But, as I stated, I have never been good at talking about my "feelings".
Even though I have known for a while now that my Aunt was dying, like many people I didn't really prepare myself for it. You can say over and over in your head that someone is dying and hope your heart will listen, but it rarely seems to really sink in. It's as if somewhere deep down there is that silent glimmer of hope in your soul that says "Maybe they can beat it". So when death comes after even a long battle with disease, you're still as shocked as you would have been had it just come out of the blue.
Memories deceive you as well into thinking death is impossible. Every time I would think of my Aunt I would see the woman I remembered her to be. A beautiful, sandy brown haired woman with laughing brown eyes. Always smiling, always warm, and seemingly always happy. So when she got sick, I could never envision her as such. My parents would give me news of her condition and in my mind, Aunt Carol would appear exactly as my memory preserved her to be. Not the bald, shriveled and sick woman she was. Even now my mind completely rejects that image. It's not what I want to remember. I want to remember what she once was.
Beneath it all, is anger... no rage that this wonderful woman is gone. It is too soon for her to be gone from this world. She was the youngest sibling in my dad's family. No, she wasn't young, but she is too young to be dead. Before the cancer, she was a very active and very healthy person. She could have lived as long a life as my great grandmother who died when she was in her mid nineties if weren't for that wretched disease. I mean, I'm 41 and my grandmother, her mother, is still alive!
I mean, its just impossible for me to balance in my head how a generous and loving mother like her could be taken away so soon and yet this monster Josef Fritzl, well into his seventies who imprisoned his own daughter in a dungeon, raped her repeatedly over the span of twenty-four years and sired seven children with her, nature allows to survive?! How on earth does that make any sense?!
You've heard all the experts talk about the randomness of tornadoes, right? That it will hit one house, skip three or four before hitting another house? That's how I see Cancer. It will skip the three pack a day smoker who eats nothing but fast food and yet hits the next person who jogs three miles a day, eats all their veggies, and has never smoked or drank a day in their life.
I will give you an example of this. When I was in high school, the father of one my former boyfriends died after a short battle with Colon Cancer. The man had never smoked or used tobacco products of any kind, he had never drank alcohol a single day of his life, he jogged everyday and ate healthy.... avoided fast or fatty foods. Yet at 42 was diagnosed with Colon Cancer. He died in less than a year of that diagnosis.
My great grandmother who died in her nineties, drank whiskey every morning, ever afternoon, and every evening of her life and never had any serious medical problems until her death of natural causes.
It just doesn't fit into my head. But then these sort of things never do, and are probably not supposed to.
No, I haven't really cried yet, not to say tears haven't been shed... they just seem few and sporadic to me right now. They're more like brief quiet expressions than an uncontrolled heaving outcry. The only reason I think I've allowed them at all is that I am in a room by myself with only the company of my laptop. If I there were another person in the room with me, I'm not sure they would come at all. I wish I could explain why I am that way, but the reasons seem locked away even from me.
I still need to call my mom, who is at the moment on her way with my father to Delaware... and I don't really want to at all. Don't get me wrong, I love my parents very much. But, we've never been the kind of family that openly expresses grief very well. We tend to talk about details like; where the funeral is going to be, what cemetery she's going to be buried in, the cost of the casket and so on, not how we are actually feeling. I'm just not up to the "polite game" yet. Which is probably why I am unloading all of it here in my blog first.
Anyway, for those who actually read this... I am not completely crazy, just a bit unbalanced on the wire at the moment and I thank you for caring enough to read it.
Brightest blessings.
Posted by spiritiger
at 3:59 PM
Updated: Tuesday, 27 October 2009 5:24 PM
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Updated: Tuesday, 27 October 2009 5:24 PM
Post Comment | Permalink | Share This Post