What doesn't kill you, doesn't kill you
(I posted this as a comment on Metafilter, with a joke that it had kind of turned into a Livejournal entry. Then it hit me: Oh, yeah, I have a Livejournal. So, here you go.)
2014 was an astonishingly horrible, God Said, "Ha!" kind of year for me. In a year that included losing a good chunk of my colon to cancer, my career imploding yet again and lots of dental horror, the hardest thing was watching my cat die. His health failed slowly and then he got very sick and old in a hurry, and over the course of a few days it became obvious he would only get worse and it was time to put him down.
I remember sitting with him on the day that the euthanasia folks were scheduled to come, knowing that my little boy was going to die in 5 hours, 4 hours, 3 hours. Watching him sit there on my lap, so very very still and quiet, almost a ghost already.
I remember thinking, over and over again, that it was unbearable. The pain I was feeling was simply beyond what I could bear. I had been through some awful shit in my life, but this was some whole other deal. I couldn't bear it.
And yet... the minutes ticked by, and he was still there on my lap, still not dead, not quite yet.
Putting him down was so awful that even now, going on a year later, I can fall apart when I remember it. But I got through it, because there was no other option. It was a grim lesson to learn, but there is some solace in it too: you can bear the unbearable. You have to. We all have to, eventually.
I look at the future, at burying my parents and the possibility of my cancer coming back and all of the other things that can or will go wrong, and I remind myself that I watched my boy die and I'm still here. I had a hunk of my guts hacked out, and I'm still here. I've had days when it felt like I was on fire, and I'm still here. And that's not me boasting about my resilience or anything of the sort, it's just how life works: unbearable things happen, and you bear them and go on because the alternative is to just go crazy forever or fall over and die or something.
Maybe some people figure that out when they're 9 years old, but it took me decades of hard livin' to learn it. So, if anybody reading this hasn't experienced their own unbearable day yet, I'm here to tell you that it is at least as awful as you think, like being on fire... but eventually the fire goes out. You may be left with some scars, but that fire goes out. And you're still there.
2014 was an astonishingly horrible, God Said, "Ha!" kind of year for me. In a year that included losing a good chunk of my colon to cancer, my career imploding yet again and lots of dental horror, the hardest thing was watching my cat die. His health failed slowly and then he got very sick and old in a hurry, and over the course of a few days it became obvious he would only get worse and it was time to put him down.
I remember sitting with him on the day that the euthanasia folks were scheduled to come, knowing that my little boy was going to die in 5 hours, 4 hours, 3 hours. Watching him sit there on my lap, so very very still and quiet, almost a ghost already.
I remember thinking, over and over again, that it was unbearable. The pain I was feeling was simply beyond what I could bear. I had been through some awful shit in my life, but this was some whole other deal. I couldn't bear it.
And yet... the minutes ticked by, and he was still there on my lap, still not dead, not quite yet.
Putting him down was so awful that even now, going on a year later, I can fall apart when I remember it. But I got through it, because there was no other option. It was a grim lesson to learn, but there is some solace in it too: you can bear the unbearable. You have to. We all have to, eventually.
I look at the future, at burying my parents and the possibility of my cancer coming back and all of the other things that can or will go wrong, and I remind myself that I watched my boy die and I'm still here. I had a hunk of my guts hacked out, and I'm still here. I've had days when it felt like I was on fire, and I'm still here. And that's not me boasting about my resilience or anything of the sort, it's just how life works: unbearable things happen, and you bear them and go on because the alternative is to just go crazy forever or fall over and die or something.
Maybe some people figure that out when they're 9 years old, but it took me decades of hard livin' to learn it. So, if anybody reading this hasn't experienced their own unbearable day yet, I'm here to tell you that it is at least as awful as you think, like being on fire... but eventually the fire goes out. You may be left with some scars, but that fire goes out. And you're still there.