I’m realizing how much of my life revolved around my mother’s impending death. My mom has been sick since I was thirteen (and that was only when she was diagnosed, symptoms were already going on already), and now, seventeen years later, she has succumbed to that. And her whole condition has been getting steadily worse as time went on – from limping to the wheelchair to bedridden invalid. It’s been really tough.
My mother has been in hospice since March 6, 2012. I know because that’s the day that Mass Effect 3 came out. (Spoiler: Thane’s death scene prayer to Kalahira DESTROYED me) Suddenly a day I had been looking forward to for almost a year because a day to dread, to fear. And that has influenced a lot of my thinking post college. The future has been something to dread, something to fear, for so long. All possible outcomes of all possible conditions (work, love, art) were painful and terrible and absolutely certain. Nothing held any real promise. Nothing could actually change the situation I was in (much like nothing could change the course of my mother’s disease, the prognosis, and the outcome).
I can see that now. It is an amazing thing, to have this perspective, no matter how much pain I’m in at this moment.
That being said, I don’t have a fucking clue what to do now. I know now, more than ever, even as these posts are inspiring people and bringing them comfort (or so my friends tell me, maybe they’re just humoring me), that art should be the direction my life takes. But for a really long time, for my childhood and my adulthood up til now, I was “the guy with a terminally ill mother.” That is a really fucking weird thing to be. Especially when the disease isn’t something common like cancer. I’m not trying to minimize the pain that the family of cancer victims feel, but it gets really fucking exhausting describing your mother’s illness over and over and over again. It begins to define your life. It begins to define YOU. So who the hell am I now? I don’t know. My fiancee said that we’ve been on the downward slope for so long, and now we’ve hit bottom, and there’s nowhere to go but up.
But by that same logic, I have NO FUCKING IDEA what up looks like. I haven’t been going up since 13. I’ve spent more of my life going down than going up. That’s insane to me. My friends have called me a pessimist and I’ve always insisted that I’m a brutal realist, but maybe my friends were right. But maybe I was also right to be a pessimist. What did I have to look forward to?
This is most identifiable in my feelings about my impending wedding. I haven’t been able to look forward to it. All the little details (centerpieces, decorations, music, clothes) have meant so little to me. Pondering and dealing with them has been very frustrating to me, because all of it seemed so disgustingly inconsequential compared to my mother’s impending death. How could the future be anything but a painful, awful, shitty, unfair disappointment? How could any of it matter? Any of it at all?
And in a way it didn’t. And maybe it shouldn’t have. But my mother is dead now. Her suffering is over. My grieving (and in a way, my suffering) is just beginning. But this is also the beginning of the end. It’s a new chapter. And the last chapter lasted seventeen fucking years. So I’m lost. I’m feeling around in the dark, finding the furniture with my shins, which adds to the hurt.
My parents’ house (and I’ve taken to calling it “my parents’ house” again, not just “my dad’s house”), which was never an easy place for me to be, has become a minefield of old memories. Anywhere I go, anywhere I step, I find something to remind me of my mother. It’s awful. But I’m finding that the bad memories, the ones that hurt me in the past, are fading, and the good memories, the ones I want to remember, the ones that are hurting me RIGHT NOW, are the ones that are appearing in bold, full color, high definition. Memory is burnishing my memory of my mother. I think that’s natural. I think that’s inevitable. And I think I’m okay with that.
I mean let’s be real here. I was sobbing over a fucking leg brace five hours ago. This is not going to be easy. I’m still figuring out who and what I am. And where I’m going. But that’s okay. It’s day by day now, and there’s no telling where the day may lead. And in the words of Allie Brosh of Hyperbole and a Half, “not knowing feels strangely hope-like.”
like an open book 