DEATH. REGRET. REFLECTION.
Perhaps the dying part was the easiest to bear of three. The never-ending reflection and regret seem a penance to bear for a lifetime… or so it feels like it anyway.
My twelve years of private catholic schooling prepared me well for the stages of grief. It seems that was an important lesson my Catholic high school wished to impart on its students. Or perhaps it was an artifact of having a high school religion teacher who was also a death and dying counselor. I should know the seven stages of grief by memory. They were drilled into me. And as life unfolded, I became intimate with the stages of grief. Death and dying both literally and figuratively. Failed relationships, tragic deaths, expected deaths have taught me lessons upon lessons in resilience leading up to my recent YEAR OF HELL.
Nothing in life prepared me for coping with the GREED brought on by the loss of a parent. Those sibling squabbles are real and unfathomably painful. “That won’t happen with us.” THINK AGAIN. GREED is ever powerful. It has transformed grieving into a dark web of pure hell.
I could elaborate on the minutia of my situation, but it would be a rabbit hole of mind-numbing blackness I would rather not relive.
Suffice to say, months beyond the loss of Dad, I continue to cope with ongoing guilt and recurring musings, “Did we give up too soon? Was Dad rebounding, regaining physical functions but too aphasic to tell us? Should we have done more?” But even more so, I am mired in dealing with a greedy manipulative sister who competes with me for the affections and trust of my mother. Meanwhile she relentlessly works in the shadows, pedaling her false narratives that cast me as some villain. She is thoughtless and egocentric. She thinks nothing of dropping irrational bombs on my mother at the slightest whim of her misguided emotions. She wishes to render my mother a helpless grieving widow that she can manipulate through veiled caring gestures.
I. AM. SICKENED.
I want to walk away. Preserve myself and my sanity. Things are things and I could not give one fuck. I have my memories, stacks of them, especially over the past decade. I ever-increasingly made time for my parents knowing that my time with them was finite and rapidly shrinking. I was the one who regularly made trips to both the northern and southern borders of the United States to be with and be there for my parents.
My sister has only shown up now with her fear of missing out on possessions. Now that Dad is out of the way, she has arrived to take, meddle and manipulate.
Therefore, I cannot walk away. I cannot ignore injustice. Such HOLLOW intentions shall not prevail. Over my father’s dead body, I will fight to protect his legacy from my sister’s self-serving intentions.
As much as my sister lies dead to me, her existence and torment remains alive through my relationship with Mom. It is frustrating to realize that though life has taught me well how to execute heartbreakers in my mind, I cannot shake this family anchor that may very well drown me.
So THIS is my life after death.
My bedtime grows later and later. One then two, now three a.m.
Alcohol. I try to temper my analgesic indulgences.
Every day I flash back to watching Dad die in that hospital room. EVERY. DAY.
I think back to the disagreements I had with dad before his death, the moments where I could tell Dad believed I was stealing his independence. I did apologize. I never stopped telling him I loved him. I hope he felt that. I hope he knew.
The Yin and Yang of love sure is a bitch.
