Tragedy Circus

I’m starting to shut down.

Today started to slide into “last straw” territory.

As I walked alone through the hospital halls, wearing a heavy school backpack and smelling of chain-smoked cigarettes, I realized what a rock and a hard place I live between.

After a long day of classes, homework, and meeting with professors to discuss my “circumstances,” I spent the next three hours at the hospital bouncing between family members’ rooms.

On the East Wing lay my maternal grandmother, dying. Sort of. She’s actually “stabilizing” after an E-coli infection that ran a muck in her bloodstream. But she also suffers from what my father calls “chronic emotional pain,” which is actually just high anxiety and really bad dementia.

She was shaking, moaning and spitting out food when I arrived. She pleaded me with to save her from some sort of kidnapping, but the story changed plotlines several times throughout. Some guy was free or needed to be free or she needed to be free or lord knows what. I took her by the hand and asked her to trust me, that she was safe and that I loved her.

All she said was that I’d better save her, or free him… or her, or (and this part I understood clearly) it would be on my conscience.

But I just couldn’t stay. My mother was on the West Wing, being admitted as part of a cautious recovery after her fourth round of surgical radiation to the liver. An embolism, they call it. She’s weak and dizzy, much like she was the last time, which required 2 ER visits, 1 surgery, and a 5-day hospital stay.

All of this would be less alarming had her oncologist not told me just yesterday that she has a few more years, at best. I did ask. In private. But still. HOLY MOTHER OF SHIT.

Of note is that my paternal grandfather died two weeks ago. Or was it three weeks ago now? I haven’t yet had time to mourn.

People keep expressing this sort of half-assed empathy that usually includes some sort of statement like, “I can’t believe you’re still in school,” or the more general “I can’t believe you’re still functioning.” To which I often wonder: IS NOT FUNCTIONING AN OPTION?