Today was hard.
My autistic brother and I went to visit our octogenerian grandmother just diagnosed with Stage 4 Renal Cancer. Our mother, who moved back home last year to repair that relationship between mother and daughter, let us know she's been diagnosed with Rectal Cancer. We find out the stage of it Monday.
I believe we say things out into the universe hoping anyone will hear us. People want to know they're heard, that they matter more than the atoms that make them. Maybe it's the lost love we're hoping will be listening, or a deity to offer kindness, or a voice of hope, but we say things like the starting second and third sentence hoping it finds the right amount of probability and luck that helps save those we love.
Can I just say though, and maybe this won't be judged too harshly a decade from now when someone actually reads this: My grandmother on her deathbed said some racist shit. The Texas school shooting was on in the background. She tried to blame it on the de-segregation of schools in the fifties: "We want to educate the blacks sure but it takes more than a generation to breed the violence out of them."
Never-mind that the majority of all school shootings and gun death violence is at the hands of white men, but whatever, you're on your deathbed. I didn't know how to respond. It's been a fucked up day, leading to all kinds of bourbon-drunk anxiety that I can't manage right now.
I just want to write a book that gets published and marry a girl that loves me; and have my mother live long enough to be proud of both events.