Is Time a Gift?
Time is NOT a gift!
Your heart stops when you’ve been told that someone you love more than life itself has been diagnosed with inoperable and incurable cancer. It’s a death sentence that hangs over their head as much it hangs over yours. Because their pain is your pain!
There’s nothing quite like this news of the cancer diagnosis of a person who has from the day you were born been the most significant in your life, the one who gave you life, to send you into not just silent reflection but utter and complete despair, and at times spiraling self-destruction. Nothing, absolutely nothing, can prepare you for the desperation you feel, and the range of emotions you experience; including suicidal thoughts I’m not ashamed to admit.
My first thought every morning and my last thought every night: “how do I get through this?” I think back to the day when I was given the news; I collapsed on the floor in a heap and cried like I had never cried before. Yes, I have experienced the loss of a precious loved one before, and the heart-wrenching grief that comes with it. A grief you never quite recover from.
But here’s the thing; I always thought knowing in advance that someone I love was going to die would make it easier; that it would give me the time I needed to come to terms with impending death. But no, not so. This advance and grim clinical notification far supersedes the pain, grief, desperation, desolation of anything I’ve ever experienced before. At times I’m grateful to know; that unlike most people I have this great opportunity to add another chapter to this journey, to have this time…..but at other times every fiber of my being is so all-consumed with anger at knowing and sends me spiraling into the ashes of some dark place I’m not all that familiar with. Why did I have to be told? What the **** am I supposed to do with this information? Am I supposed to just rise up from the ashes and celebrate the time I have left with this amazing human being that I cannot imagine my life without? And how does one do that anyway when your loved one is fast deteriorating both in body and in mind?
So, as you can see, given what some may refer to as “the gift of time” — that’s not quite how it works, not when your heart is breaking and all you’re doing every minute of every day is just trying to get get through that day. An obsessive amount of time is spent wondering just when that curtain is going to fall, and when it does, completely darken life, as I know it to be.
I have to acknowledge though that there has been one positive in this otherwise very grim chapter; through the overwhelming darkness there has been some light; the light that has shone through from the purest hearts of those who have wrapped their arms around me with overwhelming love and support. I call them my angels…..or…….my siblings from another mother.
Now I wait; wait for what is to come, whilst praying desperately for a miracle. Call me a pessimist and cynical, but even whilst I pray for the miracle, I know that there’s no such miracle of an extension of life coming my way.
But I will continue to pray, because if all I get as a consolation prize is for this larger-than-life human being to go in peace, and for her end to be swift and pain-free, I’ll take that.
Daniel Keyes: “I want to stop time, freeze myself at this level, and never let go of her.”
