this is really beautiful, especially the bit about the dream. makes me tear up a bit, really.

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I CARRIED A WATERMELON

the only parental guidance i ever had was for two years when my father wasn't in prison. but he and his parents all died within a year of each other, when i was 4/5. my mom was never around at all. so once my dad and grandparents died, i was raised by my dad's drunk sister and her boyfriend. i was on my own by about 15 or 16, and i started to try and track down my mom. but when i was 18, i found out she had died the year before.

hiding behind mama's legs sounds good, i wish i could've had that sometimes. but yeah, i don't blame my life on that kind of stuff anymore. or at least not as badly as i have in the past. i always had a hard time not letting myself feel like a victim of circumstance. but it's also kept me strong and determined to live. double-edged sword kinda?

i'm sort of curious why you started this thread though.

I lost my mother 2 years ago. my mother was sick for most of her life - she couldn't have kids of her own so my sister and I were adopted because she desperately wanted children. It was a tough process as nobody really wanted to give a potentially ill woman children to raise.

my mother had hodgkins at 18, was treated for years but didn't expect to live, the doctors literally told my father not to marry her because she was too sick and likely wouldn't make it.

the cancer went into remission and she was fine for about 15-20 years (ish?) I can remember being in 11th grade when things started to go wrong again. Her blood was messed up from radiation treatments and they put her on a coctail of pills. we discovered that she'd contracted Hepatitis C from tainted blood she'd received in the 70's. We also discovered that she had a faulty heart valve. she underwent open heart surgery to repair it. things went wrong again afterwards with more blood problems and her needing to have her spleen removed as her platelets were being killed off and there was a chance she'd die of internal bleeding because of what her own body was doing to itself.

a few more years of med coctails until they went wrong and she was hospitalised for a med related psychotic episode. after that (or was it before I really can't even remember now there were so many problems) she would have 'drop spells' where she'd pass out - she couldn't drive or be anywhere alone. the meds for this were horrific. the platelet blood issue returned and she had to go in for twice weekly transfusions. In the end she was hospitalised with breathing problems, they ended up putting her into a coma and onto a ventilator, things got worse and when they didn't improve our family had to make the decision to take her off the machines. We were with her when they took out all the tubes and I was holding her hand when she died.

her funeral was a month to the day before I got married and she was cremated in the dress she'd planned on wearing to the wedding. My niece was born a month after the wedding, something else she missed.

Because of so much else going on I didn't grieve for a while, I think I'm still processing it. I moved across an ocean 2 months after it happened.

I think in her own way she let go, everything was such hard work and there were so many health problems. my sister was pregnant and I was getting married, in her eyes we were taken care of.

I made a thread last month, I think about her all the time and from the looks of things she might still be here in some weird way, there are things to do with my sister and her kids that can't really be explained.

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Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room.

i lost my dad over a year and a half ago to cancer. he had been ill for a while but had not told us until my uncle callend my mum to say he was in bad shape. i hadn't spoken to him in over 10 years due to his alcoholism. we went to see him and as soon as i walked in i knew yhe only had a few weeks to live. he was yellow and thin and weak, the chemo wasn't working and he ws in major pain. it was extremely hard to see him like that and to have to let go of all the bs form the previous years and just try to be there.

while this was happening i lost an aunt to cancer and my grandfather was inthe same hospital as my dad. my dad died onthe sunday night and my grandfather died a week later. it was the hardest and most emotional week i've ever had.

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my dad died about 5 yers ago (summer I was 17). It was unexpected and it wasn't, he was a heroin addict and he had people after him who wanted to kill him and I wasn't allowed to know where he lived. At the beginning of that year me and my mum had both said to each othr that it felt like he was going to die that year. But I thought he would die of a heroin overdose or something drink/hep related but acutally he got run over. theydid a big investigation into it becuse they thought he might haev got run over on purpose.
my grandad (who was a gross old man) went on tv and offered a reward (that he didn't have) to anyone with information.

I'll be honest (even though sometimes people get angry when I tell them) there was quite a big part of me that just really enjoyed my dad dying, I liked that there was someething that could cause me to feel somthing SO big. like when I went to look at his body (which was a few days dead and with one eye and his mouth open and not enbalmed becasue of hs hep and also yellow because of that) and it filled me up with fear and anger and really massssive feelings. and I liked the drama and attention and telling people andseeing how their faces looked when I told them.

But I felt awful a lot of the time and freaked out by lto of things. I don' think it brokemy whole world apart but it certainly shifted things around in me. Ultimately though I think it made other things seem smaller which I kind of miss. You know its like if you ate one fo the hottest chilllis that you could those chillils that had tasted hot before might seem less so.

It wasn't wished on him but at the same time he had a sad life that seemed to be getting worse and that's not so tragic to leave that behind.