Hello, internet world! Let's talk a little bit about me, Roman. Who am I? Well, I am just a dude that likes to play video games, spend time with my wife, and generally enjoy inside better than outside. I am optimistically cynical about life, meaning that I prepare for the worst and hope for the best. When I am not nerding about movies, comics, and the latest technology, you can usually find me going on a rant about this, that, or the other things that give me immense frustration.
I have another blog that is not as active as I would like it to be. Why is that? Life keeps kicking me square in the dick. Please, do not take this as another, "Woe is me and everything is miserable" kind of blog. I do not attempt to make myself a victim of every little problem that surrounds me in my life, but right now...
It has just been the worst month, and this month alone has made it a shit-tacular year. You cannot anticipate the worst until it happens, and it is rarely a slow crescendo into that which will back-hand your whole emotional world. I really wish it happened that way, but instead, we tend to receive the Mike Tyson haymaker. The shot that puts us down, and not always out, but kinda makes us wish we were flat on the mat sinking into that inky blackness of unconsciousness.
My father-in-law has cancer.
There it is...
I sit here reading and re-reading those six words, and it is an echo in a chasm of my soul that rings forever, but never softens in tone. It drowns everything in a chaotic hum when I think about it.
I have had many losses before in my life. More of it when I was too young to have so much damage. My paternal grandfather passed when I was about nine. A few years later, I lost a woman I called grandma (everyone did). Then a friend killed himself while I was in high school. A man I went through scouts with and was one of the most honorable people I knew was murdered. I witnessed the loss of my wife's paternal grandparents, my paternal grandmother passed after living a life of alcoholism and abusiveness, my father died in prison from a heart attack. My wife's paternal grandparents passed within a short span of each other. Two years ago, I lost my uncle. This year I lost another grandmother. I am almost certain I will lose my maternal Aunt within the next couple of years.
All of that and I am only 34 years old. I know I am not even the most tragic person with all of that, but what I want to express is really the impact it has had on the person I am. I am used to the loss of life in this world. I still do not respond well to the loss of loved ones, but I know it is inevitable, and death comes for us all in some fashion. It is part of the reason I see this factually. I know time is limited for us all, and I would rather spend that time efficiently to make the most of it with those that I care about.
I am at a real struggle with the reality that my father-in-law has stage 4 cancer. There is nothing I can do. Nothing any of us can do. It is quite literally in the hands of God. I did not realize how much I hate that idea until a couple of days after we got the prognosis. My wife was feeling her full range of emotions. I was trying my damndest to be the mooring point for her boat being thrashed around in a sea of misery. We were talking, and I was expressing what I knew I needed to do for her. I needed to just be there for her. I need to just ask, "What do you need from me?" I told her that what I had read was that I should not try to "fix it" because naturally enough, I can't.
I had, at that moment, said it out loud for the first time.
"I can't fix this."
The well of emotions that I'd been bottling up for 2 days exploded out of me. I choked on those words. I was overcome with the saddening reality that I can't fix this problem. I'm a fixer of problems by nature. If it is a complex problem, I love to dig into it and find a solution. For this particular problem, there is not a solution. No formula I can use to solve this equation. No item on Amazon will provide relief for my frustration.
The admittance of my defeat is difficult in this very scenario. Why? Because I love my wife. I love my mother-in-law. I love all my sisters-in-law. Most of all, I love my father-in-law. A good man. One of the best. A man that accepted me into his home, into his family, and into his life. The kind of man that can speak a thousand words of wisdom with nothing more than a beer in hand and a smile on his face. A man that accepts me as I am with a perfect understanding of how I had got here because unbeknownst to me, he had walked a very similar path.
Now I have to lose a person that has more understanding about me than most people do. I have to literally spell it out to other people, and even then, they can not fully grasp it. I have never had to with John, and he is one of very few on that list.
I know that we have to live our best lives for him now. We must treasure the gift of time that we have remaining with him, but dammit if it just sucks and a giant bag of dicks. Not a family-size bag, but more like an industrial Costco size bag of dicks. DAMMIT! #FUCKCANCER
I have another blog that is not as active as I would like it to be. Why is that? Life keeps kicking me square in the dick. Please, do not take this as another, "Woe is me and everything is miserable" kind of blog. I do not attempt to make myself a victim of every little problem that surrounds me in my life, but right now...
It has just been the worst month, and this month alone has made it a shit-tacular year. You cannot anticipate the worst until it happens, and it is rarely a slow crescendo into that which will back-hand your whole emotional world. I really wish it happened that way, but instead, we tend to receive the Mike Tyson haymaker. The shot that puts us down, and not always out, but kinda makes us wish we were flat on the mat sinking into that inky blackness of unconsciousness.
My father-in-law has cancer.
There it is...
I sit here reading and re-reading those six words, and it is an echo in a chasm of my soul that rings forever, but never softens in tone. It drowns everything in a chaotic hum when I think about it.
I have had many losses before in my life. More of it when I was too young to have so much damage. My paternal grandfather passed when I was about nine. A few years later, I lost a woman I called grandma (everyone did). Then a friend killed himself while I was in high school. A man I went through scouts with and was one of the most honorable people I knew was murdered. I witnessed the loss of my wife's paternal grandparents, my paternal grandmother passed after living a life of alcoholism and abusiveness, my father died in prison from a heart attack. My wife's paternal grandparents passed within a short span of each other. Two years ago, I lost my uncle. This year I lost another grandmother. I am almost certain I will lose my maternal Aunt within the next couple of years.
All of that and I am only 34 years old. I know I am not even the most tragic person with all of that, but what I want to express is really the impact it has had on the person I am. I am used to the loss of life in this world. I still do not respond well to the loss of loved ones, but I know it is inevitable, and death comes for us all in some fashion. It is part of the reason I see this factually. I know time is limited for us all, and I would rather spend that time efficiently to make the most of it with those that I care about.
I am at a real struggle with the reality that my father-in-law has stage 4 cancer. There is nothing I can do. Nothing any of us can do. It is quite literally in the hands of God. I did not realize how much I hate that idea until a couple of days after we got the prognosis. My wife was feeling her full range of emotions. I was trying my damndest to be the mooring point for her boat being thrashed around in a sea of misery. We were talking, and I was expressing what I knew I needed to do for her. I needed to just be there for her. I need to just ask, "What do you need from me?" I told her that what I had read was that I should not try to "fix it" because naturally enough, I can't.
I had, at that moment, said it out loud for the first time.
"I can't fix this."
The well of emotions that I'd been bottling up for 2 days exploded out of me. I choked on those words. I was overcome with the saddening reality that I can't fix this problem. I'm a fixer of problems by nature. If it is a complex problem, I love to dig into it and find a solution. For this particular problem, there is not a solution. No formula I can use to solve this equation. No item on Amazon will provide relief for my frustration.
The admittance of my defeat is difficult in this very scenario. Why? Because I love my wife. I love my mother-in-law. I love all my sisters-in-law. Most of all, I love my father-in-law. A good man. One of the best. A man that accepted me into his home, into his family, and into his life. The kind of man that can speak a thousand words of wisdom with nothing more than a beer in hand and a smile on his face. A man that accepts me as I am with a perfect understanding of how I had got here because unbeknownst to me, he had walked a very similar path.
Now I have to lose a person that has more understanding about me than most people do. I have to literally spell it out to other people, and even then, they can not fully grasp it. I have never had to with John, and he is one of very few on that list.
I know that we have to live our best lives for him now. We must treasure the gift of time that we have remaining with him, but dammit if it just sucks and a giant bag of dicks. Not a family-size bag, but more like an industrial Costco size bag of dicks. DAMMIT! #FUCKCANCER
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