It Never Ends

I've been having a rough week. It's been physically and emotionally stressful. I've been recovering from minor surgery, which in itself has gone quite well but being less active and more restricted seems to have added to the emotional upheaval. The emotional mess has been caused by so many things I haven't even been able to sort it out fully -- and today more was added.

Here are a few causes of this week's stress that I've been able to identify:

1. The surgery & recovery itself. I had a tubal ligation, which is minor but it is abdominal surgery and takes some time to mend.
2. The reasons for the surgery. I elected to have this surgery for a number of reasons but partly so that if my husband ever decided to have sex with me without my knowledge/consent again, I will have one less thing to worry about. No one should have to list this as a reason.
3. I am alone. I had my best friend spend the day with me on the day of the procedure but once I was back home, she had her own family to take care of. Yes, I was fine. Yes, I can do things on my own. But sometimes it would be really nice to have someone here to take care of me so that I don't have to do it all alone and to have someone to hold me when I'm not feeling strong. 
4. My husband's cousin died this week from cancer. I didn't know him well but he left a wife and 2 teenaged kids behind. 
5. His death brought up grief from my sister. Again. It hasn't been horrible, but it's been hanging over me and weighing me down.
6. My uncle had a heart attack and likely won't come out of the hospital. I am now anticipating news of his death, which is causing my mind to replay the moment my brother-in-law called to tell me my sister had died. Over and over again.

I am so tired of having people die all around me all the time. Shall I summarize the past year (and a bit) for you, in case you haven't been keeping track?

• December 2012: my cousin, Beth, died. Age 54.
• June 2013: my uncle, Leo, died. Age 80-something.
• September 2013: my sister, Joan, died. Age 44.
• December 2013: family friend, Elouise, died. Age 44.
• January 2014: cousin-in-law, Joost, died. Age mid-40's.

I can't take much more of this. Seriously.

The worst part is that I haven't had much of anything positive going on to balance all this negativity. I'm still in a marriage I don't want to be in with no sign of that changing anytime soon. I still have no job, no clients and therefore no money of my own. I have no friends here to go out with to have a beer or go dancing with or do whatever with to forget about my worries for a while. You know, if I could actually ever go out without worrying about leaving my kids at home alone.

Yes, I know I'm supposed to focus on the positive and not dwell on the negative. It's just really, really hard to do that sometimes.

Fraud

A few days ago I had a grief attack - when the grief hits suddenly and hard and sticks around for a while. These are, thankfully, happening less often but they're still serious when they do hit. This one had me crying in the middle of the grocery store to begin with, but it wasn't until later that night that it really took hold and I cried gut-wrenching sobs for over an hour.

When the crying ceased and my tears had dried, I started looking at some old pictures from when my sister and I were kids. Since then, I haven't been able to shake the feeling that my whole childhood was a fraud. There I was in the photos - young and innocent and impressionable - with this older sister. Older sisters are supposed to look after you and pick on you and make you eat their vegetables and all sorts of other things. Most importantly, they're not supposed to die.

My sister and I were not overly close as children or as adults, but we were close enough for it to matter.

But here I am now, looking back, wondering why. Why did it matter? Why is she gone? Why was I allowed to have her in the first place? I feel like Jim Carrey's character in the movie, The Truman Show, where he grows up on a reality show but thinking it's real life. At some point he figures it out and realizes his whole life has been a fraud. That's how I feel. My whole life I've believed that I had a sister that I thought I would have forever (or at least until we were really old).

It was all just one big lie.

Stupid Cancer, Part 14

The last time I wrote, I began by wishing that I could soon stop writing about this topic. It seems my wish was granted, but not exactly in the way I'd hoped. You see, my sister passed away exactly one month ago.

I've considered writing many times in the past month but I couldn't. The pain and the sadness was too fresh and overwhelming. I needed to sit with it a while. I am reminded of Oriah Mountain Dreamer's poem, The Invitation...

I want to know
if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.

That is what I have spent most of the past month doing: sitting with my pain, without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it. At least as much as I could. There were times when I had to function and I would put my grief aside, but it would always come back. It still does. Every now and then something will remind me of my sister. It's often something small or relatively insignificant, like piano sheet music or Hershey's Kisses. It's not looking at photos or talking about her, likely because I am aware of the emotions that will elicit and I can prepare myself for them. When these unexpected reminders occur, I am usually taken back to the moment that I found out that she died and I am overcome with sadness and loss and tears. I know that someday those moments will also subside and that I will be left mostly with just memories.

My sister died quickly. Her health had been steadily and rapidly declining all summer. There were the brain tumours and then we found out about a spinal tumour (which was causing her paralysis) and then there were apparently some lung tumours that I hadn't even really been told about. The cancer was spreading quickly and vehemently. However, she was not yet at a point where they had stopped her treatment or were talking about hospice care. She and my brother-in-law had made some funeral plans but I don't think they'd done much more than that in terms of preparing for her death. She was in declining health but no one expected her to die when she did. I suppose that is a blessing. We didn't have to deal with a long, drawn out, steady decline. There were no hospital visits, no difficult decisions to be made. In the grand scheme of things, she went the best way. For her. She avoided the suffering, but none of us were prepared.

It was Labour day. She was sitting in the living room with her family and suddenly said to her husband that she felt faint. He went to help her lie down and she stopped breathing. He did CPR and the paramedics did what they could but they weren't able to resuscitate her.

On my end, it went like this: I got a phone call shortly after 4 pm from my mother. She said that my BIL had just called, that my sister had stopped breathing and they were on the way to the hospital. My parents were going to meet them there. I wasn't sure how dire the situation was and my sister had had breathing issues before. I was worried, but I was somehow under the impression that she'd stopped breathing temporarily. About an hour later, my BIL called me to say that my sister had died. It was the worst phone call I've ever received and it put me straight into shock. Obviously, everyone in the room could tell it was a bad conversation. I hung up the phone and blurted, "She died." That was really not the best way to tell my 11-year-old daughter that her aunt had passed away, but there is no thinking in times like that. You brain is a swirling bright light, you're trying to stay conscious, you're trying to comprehend what just happened, you're trying to find words and get them out. It was all I could do.

Luckily, my best friend happened to be visiting that day. She, her husband and their two kids stopped in for dinner and a short visit on their way through town. They arrived about 10 minutes before the first phone call. I was so glad to have had her here throughout it all, and, of all my friends who live around here, she's known me the longest. We've been friends since we were 14; since we all lived at home with our siblings and parents. I was glad to have had someone here who knew my sister.

The next couple of hours were chaotic. I was still trying to make dinner (we all had to eat and I had already started) but there were phone calls and texts and questions and comforting my kids and simply trying to grasp the utter magnitude of what had happened.

I'm still trying to grasp what has happened. I'm still trying to come to terms with the fact that my sister isn't there anymore, that I'm an only child, that my BIL is a single parent, that my nieces (aged 13 & 17) don't have a mom, that my parents have lost their eldest, most beloved child. It's hard to understand.

These first few weeks following her death were mostly spent dealing with the shock, but I'm sure as time goes on, I'll begin to notice her absence even more and begin to miss her even more. For example, next weekend is Thanksgiving. As is customary, we're all getting together for dinner. While it's important for us to be together as a family, it's also going suck tremendously that my sister won't be there. And Christmas will be the same thing. And so on.

So, even though this is my last Stupid Cancer post, it's really not, because every post and everything I do from now on will bear the mark of Stupid Cancer. Because Stupid Cancer has taken my sister.