Up close and personal

I'm thinking about my father and why it is I am so afraid. I'm wondering why he is sad, what makes him afraid. "Because he's dying, duh." Go behind that blanket phrase and what do you find? I wish I could ask him. Our relationship is one that doesn't really encourage real questions or honest answers (although since he's been sick a lot of rules have changed).

Instead I think about our collective fear of death. It seems to be that a huge amount of money, time and effort are spent trying to fight off the one thing that is guaranteed to happen to every one of us. Rich or poor, gay or straight, young or old, no one can escape death. One Man transcended death, but as far as I know, we're stuck with a bum rap.

So is it fear of pain? Fear of what happens after we die - blackness, worm food, purgatory, Heaven, Hell, reincarnation? Is he afraid he'll miss me or that I'll miss him? Sad he will miss watching my daughter grow up, that he will only be a memory and a pretty fuzzy one too - she is only 5 after all. Sad he didn't get to do the things he always wanted to do and the things he is used to doing. The friends and family of the deceased lose so much when their loved one dies...but what I haven't thought much about is the kind of loss my dad is experiencing right now.

i'm afraid of that creeping, brainless disease that is consuming his body and life. An entity that isn't capable of thought, or compassion or reason - but knows all about motive, purpose and need. Fuck cancer and fuck the horse it rode in on. It's so fucking unfair. That's my dad you have, you godless bastard! Leave him alone, go away, let us be! What did we ever do to you!

Walls

It's a defense mechanism, a coping strategy, a shield, an out - to intellectualize, to think poetically, to turn the reality of the situation into an abstract concept so as to distance myself from it. Today at my father's side in the hospital, feeding him ice chips and watching his body shake uncontrollably from pain, it occurred to me that I have long thought I understood suffering. Political suffering in the misrepresentation of people's values in our government system; social suffering in the stigma and judgment surrounding mental illness and homosexuality; relational suffering in the countless breakups and small deaths of friendships I've mourned. But this, this physical suffering, I do not understand. In political, social and relational forms of suffering I can understand the abstract concept of growth, the linear reasoning behind the answer to the question "Why did this have to happen, goddammit?" However, all reasoning is thrown out the window in the face of my sick dad, who does not look like my well dad. I don't know how to control this at all, and that scares me to hell.