impermanence unhinged he's diagnosed with death and now we tell each other we love each other don't wait you never know when the universe will throw a monkey wrench in the works 111226 ... PeeT we are all diagnosed for death. there is life now. 111227 ... unhinged i know what you mean, but his is imminent. his liver is so cancerous that the only thing that will save him is a transplant. olga died the same way. it almost makes me want to quit drinking. my sister that isn't even related to that side of my family (divorces and half siblings and yadda yadda) has been going to the nursing home almost everyday to visit him. i am overwhelmed by her sweetness. she works in nursing homes so i think she is pretty good at being with people at the end of their lives. my uncle has a had a pretty hard life. he is paranoid schizophrenic. he has remained a bachelor. he has type ii diabetes. and now cancer. his physical and mental health has always been tenuous at best. i hope for some relief for him; i pray for it even. i know the universe will bring it, sooner than we all could have thought. the suffering of this ripples out into my family in unseen waves. im crying as i blathe this for my mother. my uncle was always there, being the oldest, and my mom being the oldest stable one was always there to take care of them (my grandma and grandpa had a big catholic family; three sons and two daughters). for my grandfather, surviving his wife was hard enough for him. at 86, im not sure the old mans heart will handle surviving his son. its easy enough to read about suffering and impermanence as an abstraction. right now the reality of it brings me little comfort. i feel powerless to make a difference for anyone especially being so far away. i want to hug my family (for the first time in my life i was not home for christmas this year) but i suppose this_too_shall_pass 111227 ... PeeT They ask us to understand our grief by simply leaping out, trusting the air which is far more complex than sorrow, to follow all we’ve ever done with a pure heart and change us completely, but never for long. Someday, you say, you’ll be glass in a window that looks across a landscape of wilderness and snow which will melt when you go out there and walk, because you love a good man or woman. But whom do you love, after all? For now, you open that window and lean out. For now you just watch things: vivid rugs on hardwood floors, closets full of clothes that would never fit you, where another person’s smell lingers for years. And then it vanishes. 111227 ... unhinged she was crying, sniffling and i said to her 'i have tissues in my pocket' 'no thanks. i don't need one.' we walked back to the road in the cemetery arm in arm. 'i think i need tissue now' i traded her arm for my father's and laid my head on his shoulder, smoking a cigarette with my other_hand. we watched them take turns sprinkling earth over the urn. i popped the cherry on my cigarette and put the butt in my pocket; blew my nose with the last tissue in my pocket and held onto that too. a few days later, i was walking to the busstop 1700 miles away after good thai and tequila with a skite. i stuck my hand in my pocket and the tissue fell out onto the sidewalk. we were walking fast; it was cold. i didn't stop to pick it up. i left it there on the sidewalk. goodbye 120121 ... PeeT my sincere condolences nicole. 120122 ... unhinged it's times like these where the thought that everything changes is a comfort 170209 what's it to you? who go blather from