When the prayer breaks

My family never directly tells me when someone I love has died... They say things like "Your aunt isn't doing very well" and then it turns into "I'm not sure if we're going to keep fighting" which magically turns into "I can buy your ticket home..."

When my grandpa died, they just told me we couldn't visit anymore. I was eight. I threw up at his funeral.

When my uncle died late last year, I thought it was the most devastating thing that had happened to me in a really fucking long time. I donno... it just comes at a complete surprise when someone is watching television with you one second, and the next is on the floor, not breathing. I was absolutely speechless, and for four days straight all I did was work, cry, lie awake, and get angry at the fact that people were claiming his things...

And I can't believe I'm in the same situation, four months later.

I'm not home this time to watch the things get packed up, to watch her husband fall apart. I wasn't camped out at the hospital, waiting for a doctor to tell me good news. And I feel awful. I feel like I wasn't a good niece because I wasn't there when she probably needed as many of us around as possible.

My great-great-great-uncle, my great-great-aunt and her husband all lived in one home in Washington DC. When we found out my aunt was terminally ill in '08, I left Chicago, and moved into the house with my Mom and sister coming closely behind me. We have this pact, kind of, in my family: when one of us needs help, all of us come running... And that's what we did. And we also believed that things were getting better. We noticed her rapidly disappearing memory. We panicked when we thought my uncle had pneumonia and we tried to quarantine him (but he refused to stop walking/jogging in the morning and paying visits to the sick and elderly of his church). We tried to just live life normally and be everyone's source of entertainment... And we did. Until he was gone. And now she's gone... And it feels like God is picking us apart one by one.

I can't imagine dying is easy.

Neither is watching my family go.

I can't really imagine myself without any of them, with all our complicated histories, and all our stupid fights, all our experimental dinners, all our love and kindness.

me and my grandma. the only photo i have of us in the last five years. =(