Landslide
So getting to watch my great grandpa on his last legs was really fun today. They say in a few days he'll be dead. And the funny thing is that I don't feel a thing. This isn't someone I barely know; he's lived in our house for the past two or three years. And yet I find myself entirely unburdened. Perhaps it's because I realize that he was incredibly old and his time had come. My mom and sister are really upset, but not me. I don't feel a thing, and that scares me.
I felt as if I've had emotion stolen from me. I feel like an empty shell. It's strange, walking through the corridors of a hospice. It's like the place sucks the life out of all who enter. By the time I had left, I felt as if I had stayed any longer, I would have been carried out. Seeing his unshaven face in its coma-like state with some extra bloating from lack of movement to top it off wasn't really traumatizing. It wasn't really anything for me. I came home and it seemed like none of it was real, like he isn't really dying. But he is.
I sat on my roof yesterday and looked at the sky and thought that I'd very much like to share that sky with someone. But I just can't get a hold of anything. I feel like I'm floating, entirely unchained to fate or destiny. And if that's freedom, I don't want it. Freedom of this kind is terrifying, and there is no payoff to it. I don't give a shit about making my own choices. I want to get through college, get married, and never fucking look back.
I think I understand why my mother is the way she is now. I saw it today very clearly. Perhaps the previously mentioned freedom makes things easier to see. I saw my mom look at him and I know she was thinking about when she was younger than me. And I could see the look on her face, asking where time had gone. She isn't a child anymore, she has children. That will be her one day looking up through closed eyes at her children while they pat her hand and pray that there is some other side. On the car ride out she said he was going to a better place, and I realized that there cannot be a God that exists outside our imagination. This is what He was made for; to ease the passing of that which we do not understand. When we die, we die. Game over. I entertained thoughts of perhaps learning the truth upon death, to be told why things are the way they are and why we don't know what's on the other side until we are there, so that we can choose to once again experience life with the comfort of knowing that we will grow up to be the same people, even if we ask the same questions again. But I fear this is a romanticism.
I saw my mother looking at herself as a child and wondered what it would feel like for me to be sitting in the bed, Death's hand on my shoulder as my grandchildren looked on with casual eyes that couldn't understand what it was like to be so old that the instinct to survive was replaced with the want for release. Everything about his body said "I want to die. Let me die." I was in the hospital today being told at my checkup that I had a bright future while he continues to lay in the hospice with no future and I feel no sorrow. He's going to die and I'm not going to weep and I'm going to die and my children won't weep and the cycle will keep repeating endlessly.
I just want to find someone and hold on to them for as long as I can, because as dark as my feelings can be, I truly believe that the only mitigating factor to mortality is that we love each other, and that is the only thing that can ease the pain of death. But I have not been welcomed by any arms. I want to just skip all the bullshit and land in someone's arms and stay there until I am no more and the irony of time is that it's flying by so fast, and yet you have no sense of how fast you're going until you're almost out of gas or you're slamming into the wall and you realize almost with a grim smile that you aren't wearing your seatbelt. But I have not been afforded such a luxury. One day I will grow old and die and everything that defines who I am will dissipate into nothing over time. After all, how many people remember their ancestors?
I just need to find love...somewhere. Nothing else matters.
I felt as if I've had emotion stolen from me. I feel like an empty shell. It's strange, walking through the corridors of a hospice. It's like the place sucks the life out of all who enter. By the time I had left, I felt as if I had stayed any longer, I would have been carried out. Seeing his unshaven face in its coma-like state with some extra bloating from lack of movement to top it off wasn't really traumatizing. It wasn't really anything for me. I came home and it seemed like none of it was real, like he isn't really dying. But he is.
I sat on my roof yesterday and looked at the sky and thought that I'd very much like to share that sky with someone. But I just can't get a hold of anything. I feel like I'm floating, entirely unchained to fate or destiny. And if that's freedom, I don't want it. Freedom of this kind is terrifying, and there is no payoff to it. I don't give a shit about making my own choices. I want to get through college, get married, and never fucking look back.
I think I understand why my mother is the way she is now. I saw it today very clearly. Perhaps the previously mentioned freedom makes things easier to see. I saw my mom look at him and I know she was thinking about when she was younger than me. And I could see the look on her face, asking where time had gone. She isn't a child anymore, she has children. That will be her one day looking up through closed eyes at her children while they pat her hand and pray that there is some other side. On the car ride out she said he was going to a better place, and I realized that there cannot be a God that exists outside our imagination. This is what He was made for; to ease the passing of that which we do not understand. When we die, we die. Game over. I entertained thoughts of perhaps learning the truth upon death, to be told why things are the way they are and why we don't know what's on the other side until we are there, so that we can choose to once again experience life with the comfort of knowing that we will grow up to be the same people, even if we ask the same questions again. But I fear this is a romanticism.
I saw my mother looking at herself as a child and wondered what it would feel like for me to be sitting in the bed, Death's hand on my shoulder as my grandchildren looked on with casual eyes that couldn't understand what it was like to be so old that the instinct to survive was replaced with the want for release. Everything about his body said "I want to die. Let me die." I was in the hospital today being told at my checkup that I had a bright future while he continues to lay in the hospice with no future and I feel no sorrow. He's going to die and I'm not going to weep and I'm going to die and my children won't weep and the cycle will keep repeating endlessly.
I just want to find someone and hold on to them for as long as I can, because as dark as my feelings can be, I truly believe that the only mitigating factor to mortality is that we love each other, and that is the only thing that can ease the pain of death. But I have not been welcomed by any arms. I want to just skip all the bullshit and land in someone's arms and stay there until I am no more and the irony of time is that it's flying by so fast, and yet you have no sense of how fast you're going until you're almost out of gas or you're slamming into the wall and you realize almost with a grim smile that you aren't wearing your seatbelt. But I have not been afforded such a luxury. One day I will grow old and die and everything that defines who I am will dissipate into nothing over time. After all, how many people remember their ancestors?
I just need to find love...somewhere. Nothing else matters.
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