Flailing

How long will it take before I start to forget for a moment that I’m dying?

Will I ever have a carefree peaceful day when all things Cancer are simply forgotten?

For a few blissful seconds after I wake up in the morning I forget, and then I remember again. And for the rest of the day I’m flailing about in a sea of things that remind me that our time is nearly up, all the things I never got around to doing haunt me like deaths shadow.

I’m so sick and tired of trying to find new normals. I don’t think normal exists.

Do you know how often vague mentions of the distant future get mentioned? It’s nearly constant. “When the kids are bigger”, “We can do this that or the other when we retire”, “Next Christmas is at so & so’s house”, “That plum tree will produce fruit next season”, “when Covid is over we can go to…”

I hate that as I watch one of my four beautiful children planning his yr12 formal outfit (Covid pending) that I will never have the opportunity to take my youngest & only daughter shopping for a formal dress.

She’s 11 in a house full of boys. Who’s going to be there to take her shopping when she needs her first bra? Gets her period? Breaks up with a boyfriend? Has her first child?

Those are things a mother is supposed to do with their daughter and I’m crying right now because I know I won’t get to be there for her when she will need me the most.

I went to Sydney today with a friend to pick up her new car and it occurred to me that I would never need to buy a car for myself again, it was just another basic thing that people do that was simply no longer applicable to my life.

Every single thing is reminding me that I’m going to die. I see a 40th birthday card at the store and know that’s a milestone I will never reach. My eldest son has decided to become an electrician and I’m so proud of him and excited for him and also so, so sad that I won’t be able to watch him qualify. Who the hell is going to look after my fish tank?

I don’t think I have the right to be upset by this, it feels so hypocritical. We spent so many years beneath a black cloud of depression praying to a God we didn’t believe in to take our life instead of someone else who had wanted to live now we are suddenly screaming “hang on a minute, we’re still not ready!!”

Perhaps I can find a little solace in that reflection now, maybe I can pretend that I must die so that someone somewhere in the world is able to live so they may perhaps change the world for the better somehow.