When A Loved One Passes (First Post)

        I recently had a friend who had a family member who had died of cancer, her mother to be exact. After talking with her, I realized that what happened with her mother was pretty similar in details with what happened to my grandmother nearly three years back, which then brought me back to reliving her final days in that hospital bed.

        The worst thing is, with a family member with cancer who is continuously in and out of a hospital room, you never know which visit is gonna be their last. One day, after baseball practice, she had called to tell me she was back in the hospital. I didn’t think much of it, you know. I knew she was sick, but with my eleven-year old ignorance, I hadn’t pieced together that she had cancer, and she didn’t want me to know, so everyone in my family just said that she had been sick. So she sounded cheerful, and I was winded from practice and was in the blissful exhaustion state, so it was just another phone call, just another visit. That wasn’t the case though.

        Another thing that really sucks is that when you go in to visit, and you see how weak they are, depression just hits you square in the jaw. Maybe it’s the dimness of the room, maybe it’s the inspirational quotes a family member writes on the whiteboard in the room, maybe it’s the sad little TV set pushed into the corner. It could be how you see them breathing through a cannula, or the beeping of the monitors. Anything, and possibly everything, in that room can be a cause of the hopeless feeling you get inside. Days, weeks, months of this goes on, until it whittles down to those last few days of life. By then, you have ministers coming in to pray, you have pamphlets on “How to cope with death” and “The process of death” stacked on the little white table, and one of the only things you do is sit in the oversized windowsill and stare out at the city. The person who’s sick sleeps all day, and when they are awake, it’s for brief moments of looking around and tearful smiles, and then they need to use the bathroom. You can’t be mad, of course. You just question why the world is so unfair and why is it them and then you feel guilty because you wouldn’t wish this on anyone else, but secretly you do. You think about how much you would give to have just one day, maybe an hour, to tell them how much you love them and how much you’ll miss them. It’s not easy, nor is it fun. And then, there’s the day.

        The Final Day. Like the Final Visit, you don’t know that it’s the last time you get to see them alive. For me, the day went like this: Wake up at 7:00 AM, eat, get ready, go to the hospital. Two hours of sadness and prayers later, she started coughing. Like, really bad. A few seconds later, a brown liquid started to drip out of her mouth, then she flatlined. A doctor checked her pulse, and she just lightly shook her head. After that, everything was just silent. No one started crying. Let me rephrase that. No one started to cry any harder than they already were. It was just… shocking. Shocking to see someone who raised you and helped you through life, to just be gone. I’m not gonna be cheesy and say that “Someone who fought so hard eventually had to give up”, because, to me, dying from cancer isn’t honorable. No, I’m not saying that she died as if nothing happened. I’m saying that a death by something that’s made from you isn’t a great way to go out. Not that she had a choice. I’m not putting blame on anyone or anything, it’s just that someone as great as my grandmother should’ve died in a way that someone can say, “She died a heroic death”. But the world isn’t a wish granting factory.

        I still remember what it was like after she died. Time seemed to move more slowly. All of our close family members had been there, and afterwards, we all just sat in this little room, this tiny, rectangular room, and cried. It went like that for hours. Just crying, talking, praying, and going into her room to visit her and tell her goodbye. Now, in my recent months, I’ve been doubtful of Christianity, and I’m just not convinced of it right now. But back then, I believed in an afterlife, and heaven, and praying, and that somehow I’d be able to see my dead loved ones again someday. So I would go in, and I would just look at her, and she would be looking (not to be cliche) like she was sleeping. She had chosen to be an organ donor, so her eyelids were bandaged up for preservation. But I would just go and whisper to her, that I loved her, missed her, and that I would see her soon. In those days since, sometimes I would be missing her, tears coming into my eyes, and I would just feel her presence right beside me. Like, it was as if she could hear me and somehow tell me that everything was okay. Then I would calm down and stop crying. Even now, coming up on three years of her being gone, it’ll just happen. Her birthday passed recently, and when I went to bed that night, I thought, “Happy birthday”, and I swear that something happened and I felt her, somehow, say “Thank you”.