Retrospect.

It's funny, isn't it? The way your world can change in an instant.
People make fun of the saying "life is short". "Life is the longest damn thing you'll ever do", they say. I used to agree. I'd laugh jovially in agreement. I used to hate life. Loathe it. I spent 90% of my teenage years longing to die. I tried it, once. To take my own life. I downed some pills and bottle of vodka and spent the night retching up nothing on my bathroom floor. Looking back, I can't help but feel I didn't try too hard. The human survival instinct is one of the strongest things we have in this world, and I think that is what overcome my senses the night I took a handful of headache tablets and drank cheap liquor.

4 months ago, my grandfather died. He was the first person in my immediate family to pass. We don't have a very big family. I've had great grandmothers and great aunties pass, but I didn't know them. I didn't even know about them 'til the day they passed. But my grandfather's death hit my like a ton of bricks. I was at work, and my mother come in and she was crying. I thought my grandmother as passed as she has been hospitalised for almost a year. When all she said was Fardy (which is what us kids lovingly called our grandfather), my first instinct was to cry. I was numb and I didn't know what else to do. The realisation that this was the end of the life of someone I cared about didn't hit me until a day later. I was staying at Bert's house and I went and called my dad (it was his father) to let him know that I was thinking about him. My mother put him on the phone, and I wasn't prepared for the grief in his voice as he spoke. After that phone call, I wrapped myself up in Bert's arms and I wept and I wept and I wept. Ever since that day, I can't stop thinking about death.

Shortly after my grandfather's death, a young internet personality named Talia Joy lost her 6 year long battle with cancer. She was only 13. I religiously watched her beauty videos, all the while being astounded that someone so young could talk about her condition and the fact that she's going to die with such a nonplussing attitude. Upon finding out of her death, I spent the next few days in bed, holding close to my heart my grandfather and Talia. My grandfather was in his 90's when he died. Talia was 13. Neither of those amount of years seem to be long enough to me.

Then, almost 2 weeks ago, almost 3 months after my grandfather passed, my grandmother joined him. While again, my first instinct was to cry, I accepted her death a lot more quickly than my grandfather's. I would never be happy that someone is gone, I'm glad that she is finally at peace. As I said in a previous post, she was 92 years old, with terrible arthritis in her fingers which prevented her to be able to knit, bake, hold a book to read it, and pretty much anything she loved. She hated TV and music, and at 92 she was put on anti-depressants. Even after his death, she always asked when Phil (my grandfather) was coming to visit. It broke my heart. I think that when you are married for so long (almost 60 years) it gets to the point where you physically cannot live without the other one. While living to such an age is a blessing, sometimes old age is also a curse.

I cannot even fathom the fact that one day, I won't be here any more. That one day, I won't be able to breathe, or think, or know whether I'm dead or alive. And it terrifies me. It terrifies me that one day my parents will die, that Bert will die.. and I think about it all the time.

Life is so fucking short. It is a shooting star, a fleeting instance, a breath, a blink. It is over without warning and we are powerless to stop it.