Book of D: Living the Exigent Life

Lately, life has been quite demanding, heartbreaking, and so many other gerunds of negative context all bundled up. For one, my niece is still battling breast cancer HER2, my brother-in-law passed away, and my nephew took his own life. No one ever said that life was going to be easy. For certain, they never said that loss would be either. When one person experiences a loss, there is another one who is experiencing the complete opposite. This fact of antonyms and opposite reactions is what makes loss so unfair. It is the true definition of "life goes on." The world does not stop to mourn your loss or to acknowledge the loved one you just lost. The world keeps turning and people keep churning. Pardon the quirky rhyme, but as silly as the analogy might be, it is true. The word exigent has many definitions, but in today's blog post, I meant it in the way that life demands that we keep moving forward, whether we are ready to do so or whether our heart is too broken to leave the house, life deems that we live. It doesn't mean we have to live according to anyone else's expectations, but it does mean that we have to put forth some kind of effort to be a part of life. Although my niece is still with us, and for that I am a billion times grateful, seeing her go through the pain of chemotherapy and immunotherapy and the myriads of complications caused by the c-monster has been awful. Never were the words, "if I could trade places with you," truer than now and how I would gladly take my wonderful, brave niece's place in her battle. The heartache that accompanies this tired, ole body of mine is caused by feeling so damn powerless. As powerless as when I lost my beautiful, magnanimous mom to esophageal cancer in 2011. As powerless as when my strong, hard-working brother-in-law lost his battle with pancreatic cancer this past June 14th. But the despondency caused by the loss of my sweet, mindful 20-year-old nephew through suicide was just unconscionable. So, here I am, just a meager shell of a person, trying to make sense of things that I didn't give much thought to in the past. Things that are beyond my scope. Remembering that life is – and will always be – exigent, and as mere mortals, we have to go through the motions - whatever that entails.