The Cursed Ones

September 30, 2010

I’m a selfish bastard.

It’s 1:40 AM, and I’m sitting here in the living room jotting lines down on this stupid pile of microchips while my wife and kids sleep peacefully. I should be too, but I can’t. All because I’m a selfish bastard.

I lost my father and my father-in-law within a month of each other almost eighteen months ago. The grief has been almost crippling. Grief over a lot of different things. The loss of someone close to you hurts on many levels, not just the surface where one would expect to feel it most. The memories become obsessive after a while. My wife was expecting when Dad died. He was so looking forward to the arrival of his first grandson. One of the places where it hurts is when I ponder that my father and son will never know each other. In this, I understand Dad a little better. The same thing happened to him. His father passed away two years before I got here.

Being the father of two, I realize what it is to love someone to the point of never being able to keep yourself from fearing for them. I worry about some of the stupidest shit you could imagine. I’m not going to elaborate on the insane deviations my mind takes me, but go forth knowing that fear of my children being harmed or taken from me is a constant aching.

This brings me to why I’m a selfish bastard. After losing Dad, I find myself thinking about a wide variety of weird stuff. Here lately, I’ve even given some thought to both my grandmother and my biological mother and how they now have something in common. They have both buried a son. They are cursed. No parent should ever have to outlive their children. Its one of the things that happens that gives atheists and agnostics fuel to their belief systems. It’s just not natural. Every day now, I worry about someday becoming one of the cursed ones. One who has to walk around with an invisible appendage removed, having to carry around the weight of the ultimate loss.

Ever wonder what it would be like if your heart stopped and yet your body didn’t die?

That would be it.


September 7, 2014

Before I post this for the world to see, I would like to make a brief update.

Know that at 2:13 AM on this date, I am alive and well, and as drunk as a writer should be at this time of the morning, and I no longer consider myself a selfish bastard.

Oh, I'm still (as Roddy Piper once so eloquently put it) the same son of a bitch I've always been, but I'm no longer hurting.....at least not on the same level I was when I first wrote the above piece.

I mentioned my Grandmother, who at the time of this writing, has gone on to be with our Father in Heaven (06/13/1921 - 10/18/2012). For those of you obsessed with doing the math, she was ninety-one years old, and let me tell you, she had an AMAZING death.

Yeah, call me a maniacal bastard, but it was, truly amazing. It was the way that we ALL should hope to go on regardless of where our faith lies.

She had fallen ill with pneumonia, but all pain was kept in check by bi-hourly oral injections of pure morphine.

Now, you all, quit lying to yourselves......who wouldn't love that shit?

She had all her family wrapped around her.

Now check this out....you just might like this...

I learned to play piano from her hand. She guided me and showed me what it was to be pianist, and to this very day, I play with her beside me.

But for some unforeseen reason, the piano was left to a stranger.

Now this would have put some people off, and it certainly pissed me to no end in the beginning....

....but there was one thing.

As I knelt beside her bedside and smiled at that beautiful lady that loved and protected and raised me, she raised a weak, trembling hand to brush my long, hippie-musician hair out of my eyes, smiled and said; "I love you"....

And she was gone.

There was a viewing.

There was a funeral.

I even cut a lock of my hair off and put under the silk pillow her lovely head rested on.

My aunt, her only daughter who she was so very close to, told me that those words were her last words to anyone on earth.

That's GOLD, bitches.......

Nothing can beat that.