Tragedy

In the past 6 hours I have learned that three friends are facing varying degrees of tragedy in their lives.   A friend who was diagnosed with a brain tumour, supposedly benign with an excellent prognosis, has just found out it's cancer and they didn't get it all.  She faces radiation and an uncertain future.  Another friend was suffering an infection and now that has become cancer.   Another close friend just lost her sister in a horrific car crash in Newfoundland. This month has been one blow after another in my life.   I lost a good friend to cancer two weeks ago. My family has fallen apart and I can't fix it.  I am feeling helpless and profoundly sad.  And the way I deal with these feelings is to become very angry.   Anger is a safe emotion for me; I know it, it's familiar.    But right now it's threatening to swallow me up.   Right now nothing makes sense anymore, nothing seems right.  All of the things we do to keep ourselves healthy and safe mean nothing.  We eat the right foods, we exercise, we try to be good people, we buy the right products, we fight for the things we believe in, we try to make the world a better place for those around us, and none of it means shit.  Because we can still get cancer, we can still die in a fiery crash, we can still lose people we love.  So what's it all for?   Why bother?  We have destroyed the very earth that we need to nurture us and it is slowly poisoning us.   Karma is a bitch.  My feelings are so jumbled up and so large I am  having trouble articulating it all.  But it needs to be said.  I need to write it.  Maybe I don't need to publish it in my blog, but it's got to come out or I will choke to death in my sleep.  I want to just chuck it all.  Forget all the striving I do to make myself a better person, to eat right and take care of myself.  What the fuck for?   Maybe I should just stop trying.   Just do whatever I want to hell with everything else.  Because it all ends the same doesn't it?   I want to walk away from my life and live on the street and become one of those forgotten people.   No attachments.  No pain.

But even in my anger, there is a little voice inside me that says not to give up.  That says to keep on going.  And I want to tell that voice to shut the fuck up and leave me alone.  But it won't.  It never has.   And I will sit with this anger and I will let it out here and I will cry myself to sleep and tomorrow I will wake up and take my dog for a walk and I will see the trees starting to bud and the grass turning greener and the crocuses pushing up and I will feel a glimmer of that light that keeps me going.  Yes, life sucks and it's tragic and unfair and painful, but that's not all of it.   It's also beautiful.   And there is a little girl who loves her nana.