Onward

“A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.”  ~Thomas Mann

When someone dies it’s hard not to sit down and meticulously go over each bit of your own life. It’s like being a child and finding a rock; we start to examine every surface, running our hands over the smooth edges and the rough bits, looking over and under wanting to figure it out. The little things in life feel new again.

I took a trip for vacation and a little inspiration. To enjoy Vitamin D and wear flip flops for just a few days. And the week that I decide to throw caution to the wind and dig my heels into something new and something I have always found far bigger than myself or what I could ever be capable of…well…that week is met with a bit of heartache and sorrow.

My mother’s sister died yesterday while I was busy relishing in the ideas that Helen Jane and I had bounced between each other the evening before, my aunt died in her sleep just as she wanted to. With my mother sitting next to her and because after six years of waging war against breast cancer she grew tired or so my mother said.

I could go on and on about how my mother is living a life quite similar to that of Joan Didion’s ‘year of magical thinking’. And that I am trying my damndest to think of what, if anything I can do for her, but really I’m just a kid inspecting my life in response to this death. Even though we knew that it was coming just like the death before, it is still difficult. You’re heart still tugs a little especially because it’s breast cancer; that disease that we talk and talk and talk about and I will run a 5K for come May and it has now come to kick me in the ass as well. But instead of giving a big fuck you to February for being just as terrible as January, I suddenly feel a little bit more inspired. I want to be more positive, to try a little harder, to be a better me and hell, I want to just be. I don’t want to think too much about the what if’s and the failures but at least make a bit of a leap in hopes of hitting success.

Death fills me with cliches but really it is just a reminder that we only get a chance to do this once. So now I feel that much more compelled to make it count.