Death, Life and Rebirth

Death.
In daily life, as a society we don’t like to think about death. It surrounds us plucking people consistantly from the planet and away from us, but we think if we ignore it, it’ll go away or won’t affect us. It simply doesn’t happen.
Back in May, my father was diagnosed with lung cancer (that had already spread) and promptly was put into a program of radiation and chemotherapy treatments, the treatment had no noticeable effect, and he spent the next 2 1/2 months slowly deteriorating at home in bed. Until he died the morning of July 27th at the age of 52.
Its not as difficult as you might think, watching someone die. It more or less handles itself. Leaving you with little or nothing to do, not that you don’t feel anything, you feel every moment and at times the only thing you feel like doing is screaming. Mind you, scream all you want, it won’t make the person better. After awhile, if you’re the praying kind, or even if you’re not, you find yourself praying, or just wishing that they die. So they’re no longer in pain, and unhappy. I don’t understand what the reason is people die in pain, whether it’s lying in bed slowly decaying and getting thiner, or getting multiple body parts blown off in combat, and I doubt I ever will. Living in pain is one of the worst situations you can be in, during your life. There’s different kinds of pain though, you have physical, and emotional, the latter can be actually worse, since it wont directly ever kill you. In situations like this, strangely enough, we’re still pulled towards trying to survive, prolonging the situation, which isn’t a bad thing if you have a chance that’s larger than 1 in 1,000,000,000,000. But when there’s no hope, there’s no reason to hang on. and no harm in just “letting go”.
Death is difficult no matter what though. For us who remain alive. Sudden death is more shocking than terminal disease. With the latter you can prepare yourself, and you know, the morning you go into the room and see the person, that they’re gone. You don’t always burst into tears, and that doesn’t make you an awful person. Knowing they’re better off dead than they were alive, is a pretty good reason not to be upset that they’re gone. You do miss them though, and I have no idea how long that goes on, I figure its for life.
On the morning of August 4th, my grandfather died of a heart-attack, at home on his farm. Unexpectedly. He had gone out to do his morning routine and tend to the animals and it just happened. Sudden death is more of a shock, always. No time to prepare for what you know is going to happen.
Two deaths in 8 days is not an easy thing to handle. I’m not sure i’m doing it well either. When you’re already in shock and adapting to the 1st one, and the 2nd comes along, its difficult to judge how you’re doing. Plus the constant-stress of 2 months of terminal illness around you. Once it’s all over, the feelings that were kept back, while things get dealt with that just have to be done, that you don’t wanna do, Flood back.
Life.
You re-evaluate your life while you’re thinking through this kinda stuff. and sometimes, like in my case, you realize, you don’t like what you see. You see yourself as 20 and never having really lived. having no contribution to the world, or more importantly, to yourself. You realize you’re mostly alone. and you realize…
You don’t know what to do about any of it.
It’s difficult to think, cause if you try to focus and do one thing, you end up just back where you started, visualize a wagon-wheel if you will, with many different paths leading out from the center, you’re in the center and every where you go, you end up just circling around and landing back there. How do I break free? How do I resume my life? I think to myself. but theres a problem. I don’t want to resume my life, I want to come out of this happy, and somebody new, to have a rebirth and leave behind the baggage of life.
That’s what I look for. how to find my way to the person I want to be, and leave behind who I was. I just don’t know how I’m going to do it.
I just, don’t know.