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commanderfreddy · 1 year

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the man I am now

(a very long look back at the year)

2022 marks my 10th year on tumblr, my 25th year of life, and the ending of a strange, dark, 33-month winter that I entered too young and emerge from feeling entirely too old.

At the beginning of this year, my dad noticed that he was having some cognitive problems, assuming they were side-effects of the medication he took to manage his oesophageal cancer, and he asked me to move back home to be his carer, since my brother worked and studied full-time and I had just quit my job.

Only now, in retrospect, do I know that there is no world, anywhere in all of possibility, where I said no. It wasn't a choice, no matter how I agonised over it. I got to work and to complaining right away. I handled it about as gracelessly as any human being can do anything.

The week before I dragged all my crap across the city back to my family home, dad had a fall, and went to the emergency room. There, he was diagnosed with a brain tumour.

I think I gave up on my father more times than I can count. So many nights, waiting in an empty house, imagining his hospital bed growing cold.

Because no matter how much good news he wrung from his test results, no matter the optimism his doctors showed, no matter the plans we so doggedly laid, we had been here before.

My mother died on March 25th, 2020, only three months after being diagnosed with lung cancer.

When dad passed, we knew what crematorium to use, where his ashes would join hers in the memorial garden. All of that had been sealed in stone from the moment of his diagnosis. Because no matter how many medical professionals tried to reassure us that my mother's death had been an anomaly, a tragedy, a hideous confluence of malignance - this was our story. We knew every line, every movement, every futile rise and fall, and we played our parts as precisely as ever.

Everyone feels guilty when someone they love dies. I was sure of my role in his death before he even stopped breathing. I can play the innocent, say I was fumbling blindly through a period of life no one ever wants to imagine, let alone live through, but I know better. I knew what I was doing, when I suggested he try a week in the hospice to see how he found it, and so did he. No matter how I phrased it as a temporary stay, an introduction to the facility, he knew what was happening. When we loaded him into the patient transport to the palliative care hospice, he told me he was beginning the first day of the last stage of his life. I told him not to think like that. As though I didn't know. As though there was ever any other path.

Never once this year did I want him to die. Never once this year did I doubt he would.

I remember thinking that if he died before mid-November, my brother could still go on his Europe holiday. And he did, and he did. I remember thinking if I applied for a course in the US, I'd have something to do next year. And I did and I do.

It's not that I feel like I manifested his death personally. Perhaps, if I had gone a different kind of mad, if I had thrown myself at the bounds of this story with all my strength, I might have lucked into something. Stumbled across some clinical trial that might have done something, anything, even if only alleviate the mystery pain in his left hand that remained until he died. But I didn't. I knew, with the same certainty that I was alive, that he was going to die. And so he did.

Do I feel guilty for capitulating to that certainty? For challenging it only superficially, in a useless and often insulting attempt to cheer my dad up? Do I feel guilty for my inability to imagine another story, not even another ending, just a different middle, a final year of life where I didn't set my house on fucking fire, where we didn't snap at each other as the walls closed in, where he made that stupid train, where I did something, anything, except sit in my room and grow less and less solid, until the only ghost left in the house was me?

I don't know what I feel.

Something was my fault. A lot of things were - arguments, oversleeping, buying the wrong brand of rice, the fire (my god my god. All my furniture was thrown out. I live in a room of strange new things, objects that had never been breathed on by my mother. One bedroom in a four room house. Full and empty and full and empty). But something else was my fault, too. Something More.

I think I'll spend my life looking for it, this thing that burdens me, that overweighs my mind and crushes memories beneath its inscrutable mass.

If I knew what it was, I would understand, then. I'd understand it all, who I am, where I came from, where I'm going, what happened to me, who my parents were - everything, all of it will become clear as soon as I realise what it is I did wrong.

What I could have done differently.

I remember, perhaps a day or two before he went into hospice, waking him up from a fitful and unpleasant nap so he could have dinner. He spoke of an argument with me, and I don't even know what he accused me of saying, just that it was so awful, so directly drawn from the very worst parts of my psyche, that I could focus on nothing but reassuring him that it had just been a dream. But the other conversation he recalled, he could not be convinced was a dream. I wasn't there for his last meeting with his oncologist, doing my best to "give him privacy" (slack off) ((hide from reality)), but it was a month or two before he passed. And my dad felt then, with his transfer from oncology to palliative care, that his doctor had given up on him.

I hated to hear him say that, the bitterness and fear in his voice. I hated to hear him say that, knowing I had given up on him first.

But these are the people we are. We are crushed by the weight of life to the shape it has taken so far, anticipating it to continue in much the same way.

Dad had a few genuine high moments of optimism last year, when it was just oesophageal cancer, when it was one foe, as yet asymptomatic, that could be grappled with, one-on-one. But after the brain cancer diagnosis, we couldn't keep the darkness at bay.

My father wasn't a religious man. His mind was his soul. This was the one death he couldn't bear to die.

And so it was the only death that could take him.

He stayed, right until the very end. It was him that I saw, behind eyes he struggled to move, trying to force breath past lips that could not move.

He was so afraid of being Mum. Mum, who, for the last two? - three? - days of her existence, could not respond. Who could be woken, but not to a world she could see or interact with. Whose eyes darted, vague and furious, as she failed to meet mine. She frightened me then, the wild, lost look on her face. And she frightened Dad, who begged me, in his last week of life, to reassure him that he did not look like that. That he was not leaving me in such an ugly procession.

That he could ask was proof enough. And then his voice deserted him, and it was only with his careful, pleading eyes that he could beg.

What a relief it was when I showed him the pictures I took of the lunar eclipse of the night before and he could respond, in genuine, true reaction, surprise and wonder in his raising eyebrows, the widening of his eyelids.

That night they called me in to say goodbye.

I ran 3 kilometres uphill in the dark, wearing a jacket that seemed to float around me, like I weighed nothing, like I was nothing, like I was flying, furling out into the night, moving at last without the burden of breath or need for fuel, simply going as fast as possibly could.

Not fast enough.

When my mother died I was eating a bowl of spaghetti.

When my father died I was waiting for the lights to change across from the train station.

Life ends in much the same manner in which it is lived.

Weeks in the hospital, watching, wondering, knowing, and still I couldn't be there to say goodbye.

Perhaps that's it, the source of the guilt. Perhaps it's just another thing, another instant of existence to regret. Something you can't change.

A choice that isn't a choice at all.

I died this year.

We all die every year: a hundred tiny deaths as strangers forget our faces, as someone stops ordering their tea the way you first recommended it, as you ignore a text from someone for the last time, and your lives forever diverge. No doubt I died this way as many times as usual. But I have, I feel, become something else, too.

Something I don't particularly like, with so many of the same old flaws and failings - oversleeping, failing to think of others, walking in that hunched way that hurts my shoulders, but something new all the same.

When I first started this blog, I was fourteen years old. I was so loud, and I took up all the wrong space, moving in an awkward, unintentionally exaggerated manner, and annoying everyone for it.

Now I go days without speaking. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth and takes effort to dislodge. Something about my body language makes me hard to see, and I'll stand at a shop counter for eons, always surprising the cashier when they turn around, no inkling that anyone was there. There are few other situations beyond shopping where I will interact with someone.

On Christmas Eve I delivered a box of chocolates to my neighbours, and with their combined six extroverted bodies, was shepherded inside to sit in their sunroom and share a platter of fruit with them. It was such a strange and alien bliss, cold grapes in summer, the gentle licks from their dog, the awkward bend of my legs upon the floorboards as I asked my neighbour what she was studying, only to be overcome with an inexplicable gratitude when she said nursing.

But some of this is old, too. You can go back, dig through my archives, my personal posts, my plaintive adolescent agonies that persist, no matter how I try to articulate them better, that feel just as wretched as when I was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, eternal, undying.

I've always felt other, separate. It scares me to have proof of it. What then, what now? How do I tether myself to the belief that I am human, that I must be, if only because there is nothing else I could be? I'm no longer anyone's child.

I talked about this with my mother once, saying it was funny that we still call people's offspring their "children" even when they're grown, when they're old, and she said that I'd always be her baby, even when I was old and she was even older. Well I'm young and she's gone and I'll never be anyone's baby again.

I feel the need to disclaim that I'm never gonna kill myself. For a variety of reasons, but lately, most of all, because dying is so fucking difficult. I don't really trust anyone to get it right for me. And that's the scariest part about death. No one dies alone. No matter how long it takes to run up that steepest of hills. It's a process, a long drawn out one, even when the death is sudden and an anomaly to oncologists everywhere. The death begins at a point I can't find, and never really ends. Not even when you're forgotten - you're still dead then and you're still dying, as the universe dies around you. Beyond nights in hospitals and days in legal offices, you die over and over, constantly, in everyone's minds, in everyone's lives, as they become people you can't know, needing help you will never be able to provide, and still and still they carry you with them, your dusk-tossed dust long gone while the spectre of the person you once were to them hammers away in their heart.

I'm not gonna kill myself. I don't think I'm qualified to die.

But I'm not sure I can figure out how to be born again, either.

"Das Ei ist die Welt. Wer geboren werden will, muss eine Welt zerstören" [The egg is the world. Whoever wishes to be born must destroy a world]. I don't know what world I have left to destroy.

I have become strange to myself, to the lonely teenager that first settled into this digital space, even as I have failed to ease any of his pains. I never was cut out to be a carer. I'm forgetting how to care at all. I'm becoming thin (my doctor's worried about my diet but I can't remember to eat) and thinner (sometimes I feel like you can see the world through me, transparent and just as frangible as a window, too). I won't let myself die. But that's all I have. I can no longer think in future tense, not specifically, not beyond the pretentious, sweeping eternalisms I declare in an attempt to hitch myself to something bigger than myself.

Nothing is big enough. Multiplying by zero always gets you to the same place.

I set out to write a summary of the year, to try and get my head around this epicentre of my existence. I'm not sure what I ended up with, or where I am. Certainly not how to finish.

My bad.

When I write fiction, I've had the most success by starting with an ending, and building the most satisfying leadup I can to make it worthwhile. Probably should have done that here.

Then again, this year has shown me all too well what happens when you decide on the ending before your story is done.

#personal #death and dying talk #fred says a thing #this started out as a kind of #2022 year in review #Thing.#but there's really only one thing i can talk about #one framework for the life i have lived for the past 12 months #i really did try to find a hopeful note to end on #but sometimes ambiguity is all the comfort you can get #still its there #in the unknowns and unknowables #potential for something #ill be ok #i dont know how to be anything else

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