The Worst Year Ever

I’m going to say it started 12 months ago. That might not be correct. It may have been 13 months or maybe just 51 weeks or so. To keep things simple, I put the beginning at a year ago. I mean the beginning of the worst year ever.

I have cancer, of course. Terminal cancer. And I’ve had it longer than a year. About two-and-a-half years would be correct. It’s not surprising that the cancer is much worse now that I’ve been ill as long as I have. I get chemotherapy pretty regularly and it’s as bad as you’ve heard. That, too, has gotten worse in the last year.

Then there’s my brother, my older brother, Kevin. He had a stroke this last year. A one-time football player and a long-distance bike rider, he’s now stuck in a wheel chair, barely able to stand, unable to use his right arm. His dental practice? Kaput. My kid brother had cancer, now in remission. Lynne was ill, in and out of hospital several times. And now my mother's in the hospital with a broken hip and some strange mental condition that makes it impossible for her to clearly verbalize her thoughts.



This was exactly how far I’d written in this blog/journal entry a couple of days ago when my phone rang. It was my niece, my kid brother's daughter, calling from Clearwater. At first I thought she was calling about my mother. She wasn’t. She called to tell me that another of my nieces, Monica, had visited my mom for several hours, left my mother’s room to go to mom’s house, where she, Monica, was staying. Everything seemed fine. It wasn’t. For some reason I guess we’ll never know, Monica – an attorney, a beautiful young woman, smart and funny, much loved by her family – went into my mother’s bathroom and hanged herself.

What can I say or write? I feel terrible for my big brother, Kevin, and for Monica’s mother Mary Anne and her stepmother, Roz. I feel terrible for Monica’s brothers and sisters and cousins. I tremble at the thought of what this horrible news will do to my mother and am only writing this because I know she has no access to this blog.

I want to curse. I try to pray and I can’t except to tell my Higher Power that I’ve had enough, the family has had enough, leave us alone, please!

I talked to a priest yesterday, Father Bob. He went to Jesuit High School in Tampa with me and now serves at my mother’s parish. He said that his belief was that when someone took her own life, she was saying: "God, I’m in so much pain and trouble I simply can’t take it any more. I’m turning it over to you." That terrible last act, then, becomes a sort of prayer. Maybe someday that thought will really help. I can see how it could. For now, it doesn’t. I’m sad, terribly sad, and confused and frightened and angry that my niece, that wonderful girl I held on my lap and loved and whom my mom loved almost beyond belief, would do this miserable thing apparently without thought or care of what it could do to my mother, her grandmother and the rest of her family.

What I thought was the worst year of my life when I started this blog, became, in an instant, immeasurably worse.

I like to act as if I discover lessons in the situations I face. Lessons that teach me, and perhaps you, something about life or death or love or family or something worth thinking about. There’s no lesson here. None. None at all.