Grief or exhaustion?
Tue, Dec. 1st, 2015 07:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scarlettinaWhen ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jaylake died, I had that awful double reaction that one has sometimes to death after long illness: part grief and part relief. The relief was a combination of "Thank G-d he's no longer in pain" and relief that the misery of the illness was over for everyone around him. With Jay, for me, it was more complex. We all know, who followed his LJ, that he blogged extensively and exhaustively about his cancer experience. After a while, I couldn't bear to read the entries anymore. I was exhausted with it. I was angry. His illness was inflicted on all of us.
For a brief while, my cousin Paul was blogging about his pancreatic cancer in the same way, though he was doing it by sending out medically detailed emails to family and friends. I felt like I was reading Jay's stuff all over again, but with even more clinical detail; Paul's a doctor and understands far better than Jay did what's happening to him. I was repelled by those emails, and I realized later that the reaction was a kind of mild PTSD.
Now, cancer, as longtime readers of mine will know, is a hard thing for me. I lived it up close and personal with my mom, and it has taken many, many people from me. It's always there, and it seems like it's there more than ever these days. The last day or two, Jay's daughter has been posting about him--pictures and so on--in the wake of his posthumously winning the Endeavor Award for his short story collection Last Plane to Heaven. (His work totaled three of the five nominations in the end--the solo collection and two novel collaborations.) And I find myself actually feeling a little nauseated when I see these posts. It's not that I don't think Jay deserved the recognition he got. I've said it before: line for line, his writing is absolutely gorgeous, and he had a strange, original vision. But every time I go anywhere near his illness or death, I just feel this unease that is strong and sick-making.
Our relationship was complicated to begin with; after his death, someone told me something that he said which made that complication even worse. It made me angry at her for feeling like she had to tell me, as if it were her place to do so; it felt presumptuous and like a trespass. And it colored my feelings about Jay even more. At this point, I find it hard to dig through the complicated feelings to find the goodness. And there was goodness. But the last couple of days, that reaction of nausea tells me that I need to really step away from anything Jay-related for a long time. I'm still angry--at cancer, at him, at how he projected his sickness onto everyone around him, at what the chemo turned him into. Everything that his daughter has posted feels like it's picking at wounds I've been ignoring in an attempt to let them heal. I love her. I respect her grief. Having lost my parents so early (my dad when I was 11, my mom when I was 19), I understand it very well indeed. I just . . . I can't even look at Jay's books on my bookshelf.
That nausea is PTSD. And every time someone else in my life turns up with cancer, those wounds get opened again, dug deeper. I'm exhausted with it. I hate it. And at this point, I just don't know what to do with it anymore.
jaylake died, I had that awful double reaction that one has sometimes to death after long illness: part grief and part relief. The relief was a combination of "Thank G-d he's no longer in pain" and relief that the misery of the illness was over for everyone around him. With Jay, for me, it was more complex. We all know, who followed his LJ, that he blogged extensively and exhaustively about his cancer experience. After a while, I couldn't bear to read the entries anymore. I was exhausted with it. I was angry. His illness was inflicted on all of us. For a brief while, my cousin Paul was blogging about his pancreatic cancer in the same way, though he was doing it by sending out medically detailed emails to family and friends. I felt like I was reading Jay's stuff all over again, but with even more clinical detail; Paul's a doctor and understands far better than Jay did what's happening to him. I was repelled by those emails, and I realized later that the reaction was a kind of mild PTSD.
Now, cancer, as longtime readers of mine will know, is a hard thing for me. I lived it up close and personal with my mom, and it has taken many, many people from me. It's always there, and it seems like it's there more than ever these days. The last day or two, Jay's daughter has been posting about him--pictures and so on--in the wake of his posthumously winning the Endeavor Award for his short story collection Last Plane to Heaven. (His work totaled three of the five nominations in the end--the solo collection and two novel collaborations.) And I find myself actually feeling a little nauseated when I see these posts. It's not that I don't think Jay deserved the recognition he got. I've said it before: line for line, his writing is absolutely gorgeous, and he had a strange, original vision. But every time I go anywhere near his illness or death, I just feel this unease that is strong and sick-making.
Our relationship was complicated to begin with; after his death, someone told me something that he said which made that complication even worse. It made me angry at her for feeling like she had to tell me, as if it were her place to do so; it felt presumptuous and like a trespass. And it colored my feelings about Jay even more. At this point, I find it hard to dig through the complicated feelings to find the goodness. And there was goodness. But the last couple of days, that reaction of nausea tells me that I need to really step away from anything Jay-related for a long time. I'm still angry--at cancer, at him, at how he projected his sickness onto everyone around him, at what the chemo turned him into. Everything that his daughter has posted feels like it's picking at wounds I've been ignoring in an attempt to let them heal. I love her. I respect her grief. Having lost my parents so early (my dad when I was 11, my mom when I was 19), I understand it very well indeed. I just . . . I can't even look at Jay's books on my bookshelf.
That nausea is PTSD. And every time someone else in my life turns up with cancer, those wounds get opened again, dug deeper. I'm exhausted with it. I hate it. And at this point, I just don't know what to do with it anymore.