My dad passed away earlier this month. I don't think I can accurately explain just how normal everything had been before the family doctor sent him to Emergency. We were planning a family holiday at the end of the year to America, whilst prepping for family to visit from China. On the very morning of his hospitalisation, he had sat with me at the dinner table discussing my essay for university. Even when we heard the diagnosis, and that it was incurable, we had been optimistic. Chemotherapy is unpleasant, but it can control things. It can slow it down. Cancer takes time.
The thing is though, sometimes it doesn't. In the space of three weeks, I watched someone who had been living life like the healthiest human being fade away. I watched my dad promise my mum that things were going to be alright (a lie), exclaim over how delicious the hospital food was (a lie) and chat with one of his wardmates, another Chinese man, and help him understand what the nurses were saying because he didn't speak very much English. I watched him undergo scan after scan and have those scans give us false hope because for a couple of days things were looking as though they were improving. I had doctors tell me day by day that they were running out of treatment options, and in the blink of an eye my dad became someone who could no longer feed himself, who hallucinated people and places, who could barely breathe without pain medication, who asked if my mum was his wife, and if I was married.
My dad and I weren't really close. I didn't go to him if I had personal problems to talk over, and most of my teenage years were spent resenting him for stupid minor reasons. We argued a lot, and god forbid we ever became a family of people who told each other 'I love you'. At the same time though, he was my dad. My dad, who stayed up well past midnight to pick me up from friends' birthday parties despite having a five am shift the same day, and worked his ass off in a blue collar job to keep us living a middle class lifestyle in an upper class neighbourhood. It blows my mind to think that I won't have him there to be gruffly proud of me at my graduation, or to walk me down the aisle at my eventual wedding. It's absurd to have someone who had been just there disappear.
I take comfort from the knowledge that he didn't suffer for long. But I am angry, because it meant that none of us had time to adjust. I am angry that for all the advances we make in modern medicine, we can still do shit all against something so small as a single mutated cell. I am angry that cancer doesn't target the serial killer, the abusive alcoholic, the lifelong smoker. I am infuriated because life is so full of small unfair things we can spend our entire lives complaining about, until it decides out of the blue to drop bombshells that shatter every carefully built illusion of normalcy, that challenge every belief in every religion that things happen for a reason. I am disappointed too.
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