Life's not fair.

Over the last three weeks, I've been absent. Maybe you noticed.

In those last three weeks, my entire life has changed. All of it. Forever. I've been absent, because I've been wondering if I could and should share with a more public audience what's going on, and if yes, then how? How do I write about what I'm going through? Is it self-indulgent to write in this forum? Will it seem like I'm asking for pity and sympathy? I hope not. 

I'd sort of worked through that phase a little bit, and when my mom asked me about my blog yesterday and why I wasn't writing, it reminded me of why I have this forum to begin with. It's good for me, but I think sometimes, it can be good for other people, too. Mom, I know you're reading this, so I hope it's okay I'm writing again. I'm writing because I NEED to, not because I want to.

When my sisters and I were little and we would whine "But whhhhhhy?" to my parents, about thisthatandtheother, a typical response from my dad included some form of "Life's not fair." I don't think the true meaning was ever fully absorbed until now, at ages almost-26, almost-28, and 31. We just understood it as finality: the conversation was over, shelved, DONOTGOTHERE, zip. It was the last  semi-friendly roadblock before the ultimate precipice of "attitude adjustment." We usually heeded it. (It didn't work quite as well in middle and high school.)

I've been spending quite a bit of the last three weeks being reminded in a hard way that life's not fair. Really bad, unfortunate things happen to really good, undeserving people. All the time. I know there are much more stark cases than the one my family and I can present to the world, but my dad doesn't deserve to have pancreatic liver cancer. My mom doesn't deserve to have had her world turned upside down and shaken. My sisters and I don't deserve to feel anguish and helplessness all at the same time. At least, I don't think so. Life isn't fair in that way.

In 21 days I've experienced so many emotions I didn't even know existed within a human being, much less within me. Something inside of me feels broken. A wise friend told me that regardless of how this present situation resolves itself, "you won't ever look at the world the same way again." I know this to be true. What I've felt the most is this fiery, boiling hot anger that keeps bubbling up as tears and filling me with waves of nausea. This terrific hate toward that THING, those clusters of evil cells inside my dad's abdomen. A ridiculous, irrational fury that I can't just do this or that and fix things, and we all wake up from this nightmare and go back to normal. And, of course... I hate the unfairness of it all.

I'm going to be talking a lot about Cancer in the coming months, because life's not fair.