This isn’t a flame. I’m not mad at anyone or anything. And there’s certainly nothing that you dopers can do to change my reality. It’s just that I need to unload and the PIT is the right place.
My reality is that I’m tired of having my friends die.
I know it’s part of life. If we live long enough we’ll have to face up to the mortality of our friends and watch them suffer and die before our own mortality takes us from this earth. The other choice is that we die young, sparing ourselves the pain of watching others suffer.
A year ago, the daughter-in-law of a good friend died in a car wreck. She was only 35 and full of life.
A month ago we buried the same friend’s sister-in-law. A fast moving cancer ate her up and she passed within a month of the diagnosis.
Last Saturday we buried a third member of the same family. The guy was 77 and had led a “full life” but that’s irrelevent.
A good friend is in the hospital with a host of problems. It started when his bone marrow shut down and quit producing blood cells. Regular blood transfusions helped for a while, then a staph infection set in. The doctors have treated everything that they can. Yesterday they informed the family that they can’t make him any better – the treatments are poisoning him. All they can do is give him as much morphine as it takes to dull the pain.
Another good friend is fighting cancer. She’s diagnosed with colon cancer at the young age of 35. After chemo and radiation treatments they removed a baseball sized tumor. At her 3 month checkup they found that the cancer had re-emerged as a tumor on her scalp and another in her lungs.
Friday a good friend had a heart attack and has been in the hospital ever since. They performed surgery Monday. Thankfully, he’ll be OK.
I don’t know that I feel better. The sorrow is still there, and so is the frustration.
I feel for you, hon. I really do. My brother was killed by an impaired driver. I lost my grandmother to Alzheimer’s. And I’ve lost so many friends to drunk drivers…
But there is truth in the trite saying, “We are born therefore we die”. There is no other way. We are all actively dying just by being born.
One way to look at it is change. It’s a sad joke but that’s the only constant in the universe; change.
I will never stop loving those who have passed my way and yes, I can get so angry; it seems so unfair. But it just IS.
There isn’t anything we can do about it but accept it. And go on. If you do go on, tomorrow, right there, is a better day.