My aunt: recently deceased due to cancer. She had suffered from cancer for many years, in between remission and relapse. That was in addition to many painful spine surgeries during her last decade.
My other aunt also has cancer. She had just retired when she found it had come back. The travel plans she and her husband had made are now on hold.
My grandma is in a locked memory care unit. Her short-term memory is completely shot. She is almost 100 years old. I asked her once whether she felt she was ready to die, and she said yes. That was 8 years ago.
My uncle died in his early 50s in a diabetic coma after decades of self-abuse with alcohol.
And then there is my mom. In another cosmic joke, she developed dementia just as she entered retirement in her early 60s. Now she is between the middle and the end of the long decline. At a recent family meeting my sister teared up when she told us about how she thought often of how Mom would have been now, had she not developed Alzheimer’s. How her garden would have looked, how she would have played with her grandchildren, how she would have carried on her life’s work as a clinical social worker into retirement. Now, her world is small and dim and getting more so.
I suppose these are the good problems to have, diseases of longevity and affluence. Better to have a stroke at 60 than to have tuberculosis at 20, for example. Yet the young were not exempt. My siblings suffered when they were young, too, from mental illness that pressed hard on us their nearest kindred.
It still sucks though. It’s a reminder that disease is rampant in the world.
This is my grim and joyless post for the month. Future ones will be brighter, including one for an upcoming Hawk Ridge birding trip.
pseudoisaac 