Life and Death

A good friend today told you about a relative who was diagnosed with cancer and may not make it. You felt for her because she's never been through it with a close relative before but it sucks and the only solace is that if it didn't hurt so much that person wouldn't mean very much to you. So in a way it's good that it hurts but you've been through it before and that stuff is for a year down the road and it doesn't help much now.

You've lost relatives before. Some hurt like hell, some didn't mean a goddamn thing so you guess you knew how much those people meant to you in the end but how do you put that into words for someone. That kind of solace is for tomorrow not today.

You're thinking a lot about your daughters now. About the cycle of life and about how one day they're both going to wear black and stick you and your wife six feet underground and shovel dirt on your boxes. You sure hope they will cause the alternative is you burying your children and jesus is there anything worse than the thought of burying your child? You hope your kids will cash the life insurance checks after some tragic skydiving accident where the chutes didn't open for you and your wife. That sounds like a passionate way to go...not lying in a hospital bed surrounded by cards and flowers. God no.

You think a lot about sucking every second of honey out of your life with your family and why you don't always do that and why it takes death or illness to remind you of that. You remember writing a poem about burying your daughter right after she was born. You should find that somewhere and see if the writing was really as bad as you think it was...

But that doesn't help your friend right now and probably not much will other than a new diagnosis or some time...