Found an old journal entry while cleaning my room... made me feel layers of feelings. I hate Journaling, and generally feel embarrassed by my self centered nonsense... but I'm glad I said this, and left it for my future self to find. Some sort of validation from my past.
Talking about my feelings feels like pointless rambling. These feel like words. Like I might as well be hacking at expressing myself with a dull axe on hard wood.
I keep seeing Staci, high on the maximum amount of opiates, on hospice. Struggling to breathe dying of lung cancer. Barely aware of us. Empty right hand waving an invisible cigarette in the air. She had mentioned wanting one a few times but had ultimately been quiet about it. That gesture was some hazy truth of her desperation, reaching for her crutch in a time of discomfort and need. I wanted her to have that compulsive comfort, even in the hospital dying from it. Even gasping on oxygen.
I can't help but think of my own smoking, and the idea of Candi having to watch another of her little sisters die. When I smoke I often think of her now.
I've never been a two-pack a day type, but with a cancer ridden family and a sensitive body... Jack died of COPD, so cancer isn't the only option.
But that isn't why I'm thinking of Staci. I guess it's just something I found particularly haunting. This call back to her life while standing at a precipice. The precipice. While we all just stood there wanting to be with her before the veil consumed her.
It's different to watch people die when it's your own family and family is there with you and it was such a different process than what I went through with Jack and Anna. I don't even remember Zac and Jackie's presence. It was just me and them and that sense that it was all on me. Not in a... "this is a burden"... way... though there was a sense of that...
I guess the feeling is... standing in a room alone with a person dying... the sunlight is white coming into the curtainless room and they're brown and purple with bruises because their body and skin is breaking down instead of healing. I have to make sure they're drinking cool water, that they're clean and respected. When I leave that room they are alone dying.
What is that feeling, when I'm alone together with someone else who is alone. And the gulf is so huge between us, but then some random relative, a cousin maybe, comes to read a scripture to them on their death bed. And the person feels so foreign to our odd little bubble of quiet suffering and sacrifice. And I want to strangle that evangelical wacko. Shut up. Shut up. At least Catholic priests usually have a sense of true suffering and usually minister to the dying.
Watching a loved one, or person you care for, writhing in pain or struggling to breathe leaves you sitting at the edge of your seat, every nerve high alert, every muscle tense.
Can you live like that for days, weeks, years? Learn to live like it, and keep hoping for more days? Hoping even for more hours?
Hoping if you make a meal or bring a treat they'll be able to take a single bite, but they just might be tempted so you'll try to tempt them with some simple pleasure... while putting all that pent up feeling into cleaning and cooking because that person doesn't want you sitting and staring at them for hours on end. But you're fucking exhausted, and when you do sleep you're afraid you'll wake up to loss. Because you have to be there when it happens.
But how can I do all that for _____??? I wish I could be everything for her. I think about it every day. It feels like so much more than I can manage right now, so does that mean being filled with regret? How can I love her the way she deserves? I don't like the idea of knowing she needs support and I should be able to carry her well-being on my shoulders.
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