I know I am WAY late on this, but Happy New Year! As for my absence from the blogosphere, all I can say is life has been complicated the last few months. I know it seems that my life is always a little on the complicated side, but this has been a different kind of complicated. I wasn’t ready to write about it, and I didn’t know how to write about anything else without addressing it.
On December 5th my grandfather lost his 4 year battle with pancreatic cancer. Cancer is a bitch of a disease. There is no eloquent way to describe cancer and the havoc it wreaks on the body. Watching the person you love deteriorate is so very heart breaking. I made a choice not to see him when the cancer started progressing more quickly. That is a decision I have second-guessed many times over the past couple of months, but I can’t change it, and I have come to peace with that. See, my grandmother succumbed to cancer when I was 15, and I can’t only remember her sick. I just remember the frail shell of a women, and that is not how I wanted to remember Papaw. I want to always remember him as the husky prankster with the best chuckle I have ever heard. I want remember him on his Goldwing motorcycle and not in a hospital bed. If cancer was going to rob me of my grandfather, I wouldn’t let it rob me of my memory of him.
What has been harder than my own grief has been watching my mother grieve. My mother is one of the most giving women I have ever met. She is strong and selfless. Watching her say goodbye to her dad was even harder than saying goodbye to my grandfather. As she made trip after trip to Illinois to just sit at his bedside and take him to doctors’ appointments, it was like a piece of her was deteriorating too. With every phone call where I could hear her crying on the other line, I knew there was nothing I could say to fix it. She couldn’t fix him, and I couldn’t fix her. Cancer made everything terminal. I know at some point in each of our lives, if we are fortunate enough, we will have to say goodbye to our parents. It is part of the neverending cycle of life. But knowing that doesn’t make it any easier when it happens to your family. I am relieved, if that is the right word, that he is no longer suffering - that is the silver lining I suppose. But if it were up to me, I would have him here and healthy.
Writing about my are-we-aren’t-we relationship just didn’t seem right when I had not addressed the only thing I will remember about 2014. When I look back on 2014, it will always be the year my grandfather died, the year the cancer gobbled him up and left my world a little less bright.
