love sick

my aunt, who raised me along with her sister, my grandma, has cancer. this is a long stomach-aching nightmarish kind of thing that i hate, like when my grandmother had to go on dialysis and then had a hysterectomy and died.

i am such a pessimist, such a hypochondriac, myself, that i feel i lack sufficient faith. i want to believe so hard in the miracle that the miracle imprints itself into reality, but instead i fear that the sheer weight of my cowardliness is a danger to the people i'm worrying about. am i so selfish that my fear, my knowledge that someday something terrible will happen to me, outweighs my ability to be brave and to love and to have real hope? (oh, hell, am I so ruinously self-involved that, like a black hole in the center of the galaxy, i believe that the black gravity of my miserable heart swings the stars around?)

how do awful illnesses sneak in when no one's ready and bite out chunks of living flesh while we cry and wonder what happened to the so-real time when everything was different and okay?

when grandma was admitted to the hospital, it was because her legs were swollen, and then it was because she had kidney failure, and then she was diagnosed with uterine cancer and then, on the last day, when i got there too late, she was dead. swollen legs, kidney failure, cancer, death. it's like stomachache, bad clams, neurotoxins, paralysis, death. or ski injury, slight scratch, infected cut, necrotizing fasciitis, no arms. you start out with a flesh wound, and you end up pale and cold with your tongue sticking out a little, quiet forever, but still smelling just like you always did, surrounded by crying people who can't understand how yesterday grandma was sick and just look, she's lying right there, but she's never, evern getting up again. oh, mercy.