a hundred years of hugs

Sort of like "to be or not to be", but different.  It is just frustrating that the kindest, most sincere gesture, as well as the most generic statement screaming from the magazine cover, all speak to some simple answer or understanding of pain and grief, happiness and stress.  "Easy guide to daily happiness"!!  Excuse my french, but bullsh*t.  "Follow these three steps to daily bliss"...as if it were a simple thing.  The entire "religion" of Buddhism focuses on simplicity- yet when you play with learning about meditation and understanding what is behind that state of bliss, you learn about Monkey-Mind and how strongly it tries to delve into every effort to relax.  You learn about simplicity as you strive to accept that everything is impermanent, not easy.

Take your regular stresses, that are NO little thing believe you me I understand how that can be:  kids driving you nuts arguing over everything, dogs pooping in the house no matter how many times they went outside, a boss who makes you feel incompetent, unnecessary, maybe even idiotic...friends and relationships breaking down for reasons that make no sense and are full of lies, covered in fear and disrespect.

Now, add the thought of your best friend and partner dying.  Your story that was yet to be written got scribbled on like the bill you left on the kitchen table and your two year old found...after finding the big black sharpie pen.  Then the cats peed on it and knocked it on the floor, where the dog threw up on it...And everyone seems to have ideas of how to help.  I want to tell them how much I appreciate their efforts, and simultaneously feel guilty and ashamed that I just don't believe that "god" has a plan and that their dad will, necessarily, go to a "better place".  What place is better than here with us??
    

                                  

Besides, I believe we are energy that is bound to the earth, part of the earth.  It isn't new and it never goes away.  It just gets mixed together in a multitude of ways to make a myriad of different people and creatures and things.  And when we die, our energy goes back into the bowl of ingredients to get reformed, reconstituted, remixed and reborn.  Or remade.  But it remains.

And damnit, there is NOT an easy fix for happiness for this one.  I know that I can focus on the time we have had - the unexpected years without deficits, the way he has been here twice as long as the median GBM survivor.  I DON'T CARE.  I don't think those things are enough.  I know they aren't.

But I have to go to work because it is up to me to support the family.  I send our babies off to teachers that I hope are able to understand...that I hope don't have too many other imminent issues in the classroom so that my kids' needs have to be pushed back while the in-your-face issues are dealt with.

I hate cancer.  And please don't judge me but I hate the idea of heaven.  I hate easy answers and believing that "god has a plan" because I don't plan but there was a story I had a general outline of and that has still been screwed with, even as amorphous as it was.  And it isn't fair.  And it doesn't matter.  Because babies die, mommies and daddies die.  And we spend so much time in Western Culture trying to deny and ignore the fact that Eastern Cultures seem to build their understanding around:  we are impermanent; we are imperfect, and that is all part of what makes us and all things we love so delicately beautiful.  As the Little Prince says, "that which is essential, is invisible to the eye".

 I just wish what was so essential to me could have been visible for a bit longer.  Or that I could better embrace and find strength, rather than bitterness, in the idea that only disembodied love that swirls through coloring and warming the universe, is eternal. 

I guess I just wish I could hug him for a hundred more years.