he isn't dead yet, but he will be soon. i heard my mother talking about it on the phone. however crude and shameless it might seem, i need to write about it here.

there is a hospital bed where the couch used to be in the living room where we once all sat and watched tv, now my grandfather lays there on his deathbed. the cancer eats him alive, and his body does not put up a fit. the tanned skin, once touched by the sun, wrinkles and sags; the muscles that made him a man are no longer there. every few minutes he coughs, he goes in and out of sleep, put there by powerful pain killers and sleeping pills. sometimes i don't want to believe it, and i try to stay away as much as possible. maybe i should sit there with him, talk to him a little, enjoy the last days. but i can't do it. i can't look death in the face.

seeing him like this is so unreal. i remember when i was 3, it's the first memory i have, and it was christmas, and he gave me my first tricycle. i remember he would come over and bring pizza just for me, abd he would always give me money and tell me to go buy lunch at school, but i always saved it and wasted it later at the mall. and i remember the days at the park, when everything was normal, everything was never ending, and now here it is, all crashing to an end in my living room, and one day, we will wake up, and he will be dead.

i keep seeing taryn. i keep seeing her lying there and not moving, and not being human anymore, not thinking, not feeling, nothing. and i try to get used to it, try to imagine what it will be like with him, and i sort of can, but then again, you will never be ready. and every day that this drags on, every day i have to think about when my mother will tell me, is just another day too long. i just want it all to be over. it's not that i want him to die, but then again, i sort of do, because he has been reduced to something below human, a collection of pills and tubes, unable to ever even see the light of day, and what good is it to be breathing when death looks so much nicer, a place where there's no pain and no mri's to tell your time is up.

sometimes, the few times i look at him, i wonder what he is thinking. does he know? does he have any idea at all that his life is neatly coming to a close, that he will never see me graduate, he will experience anything, do anything, that this is it, that the four walls he is staring at, and the unfeeling television screen in front of him are the last things he'll see before he goes? is he scared? does he want to die? is he thinking about all the things he ever did in all the days of his life, or is he too unable to even grasp the concept? do people know when they're going? or do they just sort of slip into it? i want to ask him. but i never would.

i guess there is nothing more to say. it's going to happen, i can feel it, i can feel it a lot, and so does everyone else. the way they talk around him, all quiet, the way my mother hides herself in her room so the rest of us can't hear the somber conversations she is having with the rest of the family, to tell them that this is it. the way my mother sits at his bed side and looks at him, watches him die, and she can't do anything, no one can do anything, his feeble life is left to wobble on it shaky legs and then collapse into the black eternity which is death.

it's very hard to look at him, his failing liver, his weak lungs, the cancer in his bones, and to think that this was once a person who laughed and joked and ate and yelled and talked and walked around and smiled. it's very hard to watch someone always be there and then to watch them fall apart in front of you. it's hard to realize that our bodies soon end, that there are forces greater than us, and there is absolutely nothing that can be done.

right now i don't know what to feel. sometimes i think i should cry, but i can't, and that makes me feel weird. i am just numb a lot of the time, devoid of emotion, going to school and forgetting it there but then coming home and seeing it again.

in a month from now, i will have went to the shore, and school will be almost over, and i will have spent lots of my time rotting at work. my life will be the same, everything will be there. i think.