Grief, continued.

OK, I think I'm starting to get it now. About grief, I mean. It's not something that goes away, but something you learn to live with. A lot of people told me this, but I didn't understand it right away.

Now that it's been almost 7 months, I'm starting to feel the severity it of it now, with all these things that happen that I want to tell her about, and all these funny or silly memories I want to remind her about, that I can no longer tell her again, and I feel the gravity of them all building up in my head.

I realized that when Mike got back from his tour, although I was so beyond thrilled to have him back home (and I still very much am), it doesn't make the sadness disappear. It's still there, and it always will be there--I just need to get used to that being there and work around it. A short video I just watched illustrated this idea in a pretty simple way that helped me understand this, too.

You know, I was thinking--about Mike coming home and me still being sad, I mean. I think it's like..well, maybe something like this: imagine your leg is torn open in an accident and you're in horrible pain and even though you got your antibiotics and your stitches and your cast or whatever, you're still sitting there in agonizing pain wondering when you'll feel better. I mean, your leg was ripped apart--you feel like crap. Maybe some awesome things happen while you're nursing your destructed leg--you get visits from significant others, and family, and friends, or maybe you get to see a show or movie you've been wanting to see or even attend some kind of cool concert. You can be happy and enjoy that you get these happy things happening too, but it doesn't make your mangled, wounded leg feel any better. That bitter, burning, incomprehensibly nasty feeling is going to linger no matter what kind of activities you engage in, no matter who your company may be. 

What do you do with the inside jokes?!

It's remembering all the inside jokes that's the hardest. Not reminiscing about them, but remembering them and thinking how I'll go quote them to my mom...and then realizing I have no one to quote them to. The inside jokes will have to stay inside my head forever now. I can try to explain them to people, but there's no point, really. I just have to keep them to myself, and that sucks. That really, really sucks. 

On Twitter just now, I came across something my mom & I used to quote often, framed as a really funny joke, and for the first time in awhile, actually forgot--I actually went to copy/paste it to send to her--and then I was like, "What am I doing?"

I'm doing better these days in general but then there's moments (or entire days) where everything just feels awful and I don't feel like deriving joy from anything the world has to offer, because she no longer can, so it isn't fair. 

I guess this will forever be a cancer blog after all

Unfortunately! I guess this blog can't stray too far from its original purpose.

My "On This Day" on Facebook is a disaster zone of spooky posts from 2013, ten days before I first got admitted to the hospital and didn't come back out again for six weeks after being diagnosed with leukemia. It never gets old, every year--how fucking freaky it is, to read back on those posts just before everything went downhill, how clueless I was about my "constant flu" never going away.

And now it's been 5 years! So that means in April, I'll be in full remission, which I'm supposed to be excited about, but instead I'm just depressed, because my mom isn't around for it, and also because we both had cancer at the same time, except I beat it and she didn't, so it doesn't feel very celebratory, even though it should be, because I really, truly didn't think I would make it to 5 years.

When I got diagnosed, I remember reading in an AML pamphlet how low the life expectancy was at 3 years' time, let alone 5. The amount of survivors who made it to 5 years seemed like such a tiny percentage of people. There were times when I truly didn't think I would be alive five years from then, yet here I am. If I make it to April, yay! True remission, as declared by doctors.

When my mom died, a social worker, along with quite a few people I knew who had already gone through losing a parent, all said that one of the hardest things at first is landmark events and anniversaries. My mom died just a few weeks before Christmas, so when Christmas and New Year's came, I was still in quite the shock, and things were still feeling too surreal to really register. Not that things register all that great now, either. I still find it impossible to believe that my mom is gone. I keep thinking of things I want to tell her--no, need to tell her--and I stow them away in my head for later. But what "later"? There is no later, and there's never going to be. But I don't understand that, somehow. It only feels like she's away for just awhile, but that she'll be back eventually, and that's when I'll get to tell her all the things. My mind genuinely isn't able to grasp the fact that that's never going to happen. It's an absolutely incomprehensible concept; utterly foreign to me. It's just gibberish that I'm still struggling to understand. Anyway, so going back to the anniversary thing. So yeah, Christmas and New Year's passed, and it was certainly weird as shit, but nothing too unmanageable, mostly because of how strange it all was. But now with this anniversary of when I was diagnosed with leukemia, and because it's such a landmark amount of time...this feels weird going through without my mom here, and by "weird" I mean terrible. Also, because of the nature of it all--the murderous disease that I got to survive but she didn't. Also, it doesn't help that my birthday happens around the same time. (Yeah, being diagnosed with leukemia for my birthday...if you can't find the humour in that, then what's the point, really.) I dunno, it all feels like a bunch of too much to be going through at once.

I had more to say, but I've lost my train of thought, I think.