I’m taking a break from positivity.
I have a million emotions running through me. None of which are of the happy positive kind.
I cannot stop crying. I am angry, I am numb and I am most of all disappointed in hope and the universe.
For the past three weeks, I have cried every day. To make it worse and I can’t stop myself, I have become obsessed with googling. Wherever my mind wanders to, I google in search for a glimmer of hope, obsessed with finding answers to all the random questions that pop into my head. I’ve even googled how long does it take to cry away all my tears?
You see I had come to terms that I will lose my father to Alzheimers. It’s been a process watching him slowly fade away, but it started to hit home when we had to validate his palliative care - watching him struggle to swallow and communicate, and laying there motionless. Selfishly I take comfort knowing that when I visit him, he still squishes his face to smile and wiggles his lips when I kiss him on his forehead. This will eventually stop and the sadness will again wash over me.
However, saying goodbye to dad isn’t why my emotions are running wild. Dad reaching the end-of-life stage has been a long time coming. While it was never going to be easy and without tears, it has been something we’ve been preparing for. However, in focusing on my father, we neglected my mother.
Here is where I feel like I’ve been handed a grenade. My beautiful, strong, patient, loving, selfless mother has been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. I am beyond devastated. How can someone who doesn’t nor has ever smoked have lung cancer??
Since placing my father into aged care at the onslaught of Covid-19, my mother gave up everything to be by my father’s side everyday for the past two nearing three years. She took on all our guilt, knowing that my father never wanted to end up in a “nursing home” but there was no other option. I had thought or hoped (but that’s a fail), that once my father passed, mum would slowly return to her old self again.
Guess that won’t be happening.
I always had an inkling that when one parent passes, the other would not be far behind. The romantic in me, which has been instilled in me by my folks, was they would have died of a broken heart as the love they have for each other was beyond any love I have ever known. I never imagined I would watch each parent wither away from a terminal illness.
To the universe, I tried to be a good person, I don’t understand where I went wrong, where my family went wrong.
I’m over searching for that elusive light. Should I even be lucky to find it, the two most precious people to me won’t even be here to share it.
We can’t control what happens, but we can control how we respond to it. Right now, my response is f*ck you universe. I can’t see how I will ever get over this…