the last dinosaur

So today has sucked.

A dear family friend is fighting for his life and it's not looking good, in fact it's looking pretty damn bad. Life sustaining machines are at work with a clock ticking, waiting to see if this last effort could possibly turn things around.  He's younger than me and I'm under 30 (albeit for less than two months). If I was religious I'd be on my knees preying, instead I'm willing all the positivity left in me his way and cursing the god I don't believe in.

I swear of everything modern medicine has figured out, why can't they figure out cancer? Fuck cancer, seriously. I've already lost two people so far to it this year with two more struggling through it. And I get that the whole the world is already over crowded, and perhaps people aren't meant to live that long, and cancer is possibly just, well, population control. But that doesn't make it suck any less, it's still a horrible, awful, gruesome disease which brings me to the next reason today has been shit: flashbacks.

Flashbacks of my aunt, dying an early yet drawn out death from that cocksucker of a disease. Awful, pathetic images of a person losing all the basic luxuries of life that the rest of us healthy people take for granted. And of course thinking of her makes me think of my dearest grandmother who died the very night before her daughter. My amazing, classy, iconic grandmother who spent the last five years of her life in a hospital bed unable to speak, see, or really do anything. It was a pathetic excuse for a life that was cursed to last far too long (no I'm not saying I'm glad she's dead, I'm saying her final years were awful and did absolutely no justice to the great woman she was). And of course thinking of her makes me think of my dad, my strong, proud, smart as a whip, extraordinary dad. I can't even get into the flashbacks that have been running through my mind all day of him as this font is already blurred as I fight to keep my tears in. I will not let them out. Deep breath.

So yeah, my day has been plagued with flashbacks of horrible scenes I wish I could forget, of people I loved and lost. In fact, much of my life I've been plagued with these types of images and this is really the first time I've told anyone about them (to be fair I have no idea who exactly I'm telling this to or if anyone even reads this blog at all, and I'm not even telling, I'm typing). But yeah, these horror film like scenes have been playing in my mind as long as I can remember. When they start they don't stop no matter how hard I try to will them from my mind. They happen in wake and slumber and don't seem to have any "trigger" that brings them on. I recall one particularly disturbing dream in which a disgruntled employee of my fathers interrupted a nice family picnic and decapitated each of my family members (dog included) one by one while I watched. It was one of those black and white dreams where the only color is the bright red blood. I was six years old. My husband still periodically wakes me from sobbing in my sleep as the nightmares continue to this day.

But back to the point and namesake of this entry. I am the last remaining blood holder of my paternal family, every stinking one of them now sleeps in an urn or six feet under ground. Everyone of them but me that is. They are all extinct, and I am the very last dinosaur.

And after viewing today's apocalyptic images of earthquakes, tsunamis, and now wildfires in Oklahoma, I fear we are all dinosaurs. Carnivorous dinosaurs, eating away at our Earth until it finally gives in and burns or implodes or freezes over. She is angry and she's showing us.

And that's why my day sucked.