DEAD, LIVING DEAD & DEADBEATS

When Alexandra and Vivi succumbed to cancer last January and June I felt a large chunk of me vanish with them. My dearest, closest friends of the last decade disappeared so quickly. I promised not to let their deaths be for naught and that I would always carry a part of them with me forever alive.

Promises aside, the only life-changing impact of the death of these two very special and important women has been my loss of spirit. There’s nothing like a loved one’s death to make you view your own mortality and nakedness and realise that each and every moment must count.

Unfortunately, without their presence in my life, the moments are meaningless. I force myself to spend time with Saturday morning friends in the hope that something will somehow click. I half-heartedly accept invitations from new friends but feel that doing so is treason as nobody and nothing can fill this void and every other human interaction (aside from time with my kiddies) is pale compared to time spent with Alexandra and Vivi.

Late at night when I can’t sleep, I have imaginary conversations with them woven and replayed from actual discussions we once had. Alexandra still says: “I choose to be happy! It’s a choice you know. Just make the decision and be happy!” And I protest as I always have.

Vivi butts in, using her usual perky tone: “Snap out of it! As Eckhart Tolle says, ‘live for the now’. Do you even realise how lucky you are? (she munches on a dried fig as she says this) You are so fortunate to even have the luxury of being unhappy…Can you see how many people around you there are that don’t even know they are miserable?”

She’s right. Here I am complaining when I have two truly amazing children, a devoted and smart husband, loving parents, cushy job, friends knocking down my door and a blog with one follower.

Imagine how dreadful my life would be if I was stuck in a dead-end job at some supermarket counter working long shifts with varicose veins popping from my legs after constantly standing. My body fast losing its firmness from all the stress of trying to conceive a child with some deadbeat husband who I fell in love with because he wrote 6-page letters (the same lines he probably wrote to other girls before me) that made me feel special though they were just carbon-copied FAKE words. And while I worked HARD in my blissful ignorance, trying to make him happy by giving him a child, my sneak of a LIGHT-headed husband would be so preoccupied with his HARD penis at XXX hotels with other women – feeding them the same crappy lines...(after all, business goes on as usual, as it always has)...

And in my ignorance and “lightness” of being (after all, as uneducated checkout girl, I prefer Loipon magazine to Kafka), I wouldn’t even come close to realising how truly unhappy I am. And life would just go on. Wasted.

The only good news for such a lost case as the hypothetical supermarket example is that some day the fate of the check-out chic and her sex-starved husband will be the same as that of Vivi, Alexandra and myself. At the end we all die and turn to dust. Not even the fake words are left.

Do we really deserve this?

Either way, we have no choice. Here's a poem I scrawled after Alexandra's funeral:

All us ant friends came to your grave

Drawn by our misery.

We had taken what you gave
Before your soul broke free.
And yet my darling one,
Our tears will someday dry.
And ants will rush under the sun
Until we, too, shall die.