I stood behind when no one asked me
A friend passed away last week. We'd known each other for about 20 years.
He'd been fighting cancer for the last year. He had also moved away to the mid west and I only saw him a few times a year for the last...few years.
I did go see him the week before he died. He had come home to his parents house to die. It was weird to see him look so small, so frail. He just looked, small. Which was extra strange for him. It often seemed like there wasn't enough room for anyone else when he was around. He had a very big personality. But when I went to see him, he was not that. The cancer had eaten him alive from the inside. And now he was just a shell, a husk of the man he once was. Quiet, thin, ashen, his voice strained and raspy. Not like him.
Strange things had been moved into the house: wheel chair. hospital bed, oxygen, some strange machine with hoses that I'm still not sure what it was. None of it seemed right. Everyone sat around him in the living room talking in a stew of things that didn't quite go together right: the old crazy times, the current concerning times, and funeral plans. His daughter showed me on her phone the jewelry she'd picked out to wear his ashes in. Yikes :(
Then he died. Just like that. He was alive and then he wasn't. And now I find myself a bit haunted. Similar to how I felt after Ian died. I remember telling myself when Ian died, "The lesson of the ghost is not to become him".
That really made sense for Ian. He was such a lonely angry closed off soul. Afraid to reach out or even say hello. He died alone in his apparent, and it was a week before anyone found him. Yuck.
But that doesn't make sense for now. That's not the lesson of this ghost. I think it's something about talking to everyone. Being a friend. Being open. Giving everyone a chance. Sometimes giving people 3, 4, or 11 chances. Loving people with a passion so big it almost breaks you in two. I think that's what's I'm going to learn this time.
He'd been fighting cancer for the last year. He had also moved away to the mid west and I only saw him a few times a year for the last...few years.
I did go see him the week before he died. He had come home to his parents house to die. It was weird to see him look so small, so frail. He just looked, small. Which was extra strange for him. It often seemed like there wasn't enough room for anyone else when he was around. He had a very big personality. But when I went to see him, he was not that. The cancer had eaten him alive from the inside. And now he was just a shell, a husk of the man he once was. Quiet, thin, ashen, his voice strained and raspy. Not like him.
Strange things had been moved into the house: wheel chair. hospital bed, oxygen, some strange machine with hoses that I'm still not sure what it was. None of it seemed right. Everyone sat around him in the living room talking in a stew of things that didn't quite go together right: the old crazy times, the current concerning times, and funeral plans. His daughter showed me on her phone the jewelry she'd picked out to wear his ashes in. Yikes :(
Then he died. Just like that. He was alive and then he wasn't. And now I find myself a bit haunted. Similar to how I felt after Ian died. I remember telling myself when Ian died, "The lesson of the ghost is not to become him".
That really made sense for Ian. He was such a lonely angry closed off soul. Afraid to reach out or even say hello. He died alone in his apparent, and it was a week before anyone found him. Yuck.
But that doesn't make sense for now. That's not the lesson of this ghost. I think it's something about talking to everyone. Being a friend. Being open. Giving everyone a chance. Sometimes giving people 3, 4, or 11 chances. Loving people with a passion so big it almost breaks you in two. I think that's what's I'm going to learn this time.