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WELCOME TO RAPTURE

In short, my mom’s dying. She’s currently in a hospice wing in Louisville undergoing pain management for aggressive cancer that she fought all last year. There’ve been a lot of ups and downs, but at this point we just want her to go with as little pain as possible.

Recently, I made the executive decision not to drop out of school during her final months because education means a lot to not just me but my mother who desperately fought for me to go to the school I’m at now. She wanted this, and while it’s a financial burden, it originally wasn’t meant to be. We were in a good financial place, I had almost full scholarship and my parents were certain they’d be able to cover the difference. That said, through the grief, working and trying to summon the strength to get out of bed has been incredibly taxing, I ignored my financial aid situation until my meal plan got turned off yesterday. I’m over 4,000 in the hole and the school just isn’t being understanding.

I can’t work full-time (but I am working to eat) between driving the two hours from school to home to see her and keeping it together, and I’m already behind on commissions because I’ve been coping terribly. I can’t dropout because it would break her heart and I don’t think I’d be able to make it through this without academia as a distraction. 

Already my mother is shouldering a lot of blame. She’s leaving behind my fifteen-year-old sister and five-year-old nephew she adopted after her son died. She’s spent her final months apologizing, and the other week she finally realized she wouldn’t be alive to see me graduate this spring. I don’t know what to say or how to articulate how heartbroken I am right now, but I’m honestly destroyed because I was rushing through undergrad to graduate in time for her. Her life has been hard, she’s been a badass fighter since the start, and while I know everyone says this, she genuinely doesn’t deserve this.

I want to graduate for her. I have to have some kind of education and stability in case I wind up with one of those kids. I want to be a pillar for my sister when she goes to college and be able to afford to assist my nephew. I have to graduate. I have to get through this year. Dropping out, no matter how grief stricken I am, is not an option. I have a near 4.0 GPA and I’m getting ready for grad school this semester so that these kids will have something. No one else has been willing to cope the way I am, and it scares me for them. They’re all I think about.

Here’s a link to donate and there’s a donation button on my blog.