So, a little over 3 months ago my dad received the diagnostic of pancreatic cancer, already at the terminal stage
And this morning it finally claimed him.
Honestly, my feelings about it all are complicated. He was a man of very unhealthy habits -- he smoked for 40 years before developing a lung disease that made him quit; he stuffed his face with sugar and cholesterol and processed foods; he was sedentary with a very stressful job in the military, and already a history of cancer from his whole family. It was a time bomb just ticking, but one thing is to predict it happening, and the other is to see it unfolding before your eyes in such a short time and completely transforming the routine of your home into a slow motion funereal march.
He was also not a good man. Racist, homophobic, extremely classist, sexist and abusive, in no small part responsible for me and mom’s mental illnesses, and in no small part responsible for my own creativity’s decline (as a military engineer, he very much looked down on arts and humanities in general). I really don’t have many good things to say about him, but I still would rather that my last memory of him wasn’t of him bedridden with his limbs atrophying because his body was consuming itself.
He was lucid even through the morphine. So, for someone as afraid of death as he was, to watch yourself slowly falling into its embrace, it must have been terrifying. I truly wish this fate for no one, even if many aspects of his journey downwards sometimes seemed like laser-guided karma coming to bite him in the ass.
It’ll probably take a while for all of this to really register since I’ve spent the past weeks numbing myself down a little with alprazolam, but meds don’t really keep you from thinking about mortality in general and from thinking about The Future. But I guess I’m stable. I’m more worried about mom.
Well, at least we’re not alone.
I’m also sorry I gave no indication of this happening at all during all this time -- fronting is kind of an automatic defense mechanism for me, even if it takes a lot of energy to keep up.
