Death's Smash & Grab

Futile attempts to make sense of another loss

Photo by the author

My aunt passed away yesterday morning.

It's been about 24 hours since I received the news and I'm in a weird state of lock-up. Emotions are completely frozen. I can't process it and I'm trying to work out why.

Cancer has torn through the women in my family. Lynch's Syndrome runs rampant in our genes, making uterine, ovarian, and colon cancers chillingly common. My surviving aunt has applied the bone chilling term "Turbo Cancers" to describe them. They are aggressive and quick. The doctors diagnosed my aunt just before Thanksgiving and she passed not even a week into the New Year. Cancer took my grandmother in her mid 60s, my mom in her 50s, and my cousins, all younger than me, each already had their own brushes with this malignant gut-rot.

Ravenous. Insatiable. Relentless. I stupidly try to personify this force of nature that has ripped through my bloodline. These were all good, loving people with dreams and futures that were pilfered away from them with no mercy. My poor aunt never had a degree. She loved the ocean, but worked in a bail bonds office and was on call at all odd hours of the night, worked completely dry. I'd talk to her over the phone and she just sounded exhausted. The promise of retirement in a few years, she told me, was all that kept her going.

She didn't even get that, and it floods me with a potent anger that I don't exactly know where to direct. She worked to exhaustion her entire adult life, finally being released from the grind because she needed to go home to die.

Next comes the cremation, and then the service, just like it did for my grandma and my mom before that. Another run through the motions. We've been on this train before. I sit here wondering how many more times we'll have to be put through this. How many more times do we have to dig deep and attempt to wrench some kind of underlying meaning out of this absurd dance?

I think I've hit the point where I've realized that trying to make sense of it is completely futile. The first time was devastating, the second time was puzzling, and this round is just paralyzing. Cancer's gonna cancer, and the deck is stacked against us. Nature just has a warped sense of humor, I guess. I figure I'll just torture myself or go insane trying to rationalize it.

Best I can do is to try yanking the lawnmower cord of perspective once again, try spinning this tragedy into another call to action, just like last time, and the time before that. I'll give myself the same pep talk, tell myself to treasure every day and encourage myself to maybe even take a risk or two to vault out of the mundane ruts I tend to always hover over and drop into. Will the lessons of loss ever stick? Now and then I'll make an honest effort to claw myself out of this glass jar I find myself trapped in, but I seem to always find myself back where I began, passing hours in the office, sights set towards Friday so that I can get out and actually live for a couple of days before doing it all over again.

It's a strange feeling, going through life and watching your loved ones being picked off, one by one, another majestic tree being felled every few years. It makes me feel increasingly old, alone, and insecure. Looking back, I remember the holidays of my early childhood. Aunts, uncles, parents, cousins, and friends would all descend upon my Grandparent's house. I felt safe surrounded by my family. Sitting here now and reflecting, just a couple months out from my 46th birthday, the only ones remaining from those gatherings are my oldest aunt, an uncle, and my younger brother. There is a very clear contrast between the warmth that I felt in my childhood and the growing shadow of isolation that began inching towards my toes when my grandma died 25 years ago and set this whole death-chain into motion.

Make it mean something. But outside of my vain attempts, it doesn't seem to. All layers have been peeled away and exposed. There’s nothing else to contemplate and discover. This is it. What you see is what you get.

Maybe one day it will come to me suddenly in the earliest hours of the morning, it'll cut through the twilight like a sharp flash of red light, while the rest of the world is still sound asleep. A sudden clarity will sweep away all the muddiness and mystery, and I'll finally understand why they had to be taken away before their time. The reason will be standing there in plain sight, and I'll no longer have to be appalled when death comes to snatch someone else away again.