This is not a pretty piece of tart escapism. Sorry.
Today has been all about death again, sheesh, if you were to casually encounter this blog you'd think I was rilly goth yeah? Like, that's not the case. M'kay?
Today's death is in the family. I won't say who. The dying may be already spoken for, but that's no excuse to go around using their real name willy-nilly.
He's dying, according to my good friend Desmond Patrick Joseph Mary Emmanuel Cullen (that's his full name and he's perfectly alive) my dying family member will succumb to his fungalising skull tumour within a few weeks. This is the end of those few weeks. And Desmond was right.
The last time I saw him was two weeks ago, he looked pretty normal to me. I saw a mobile phone camera image of him yesterday and the change was shocking. The fungaloid tumour has spread across his skull above his right eye. In the most recent photograph the tumour has obviously been making itself known across all the neighbourhoods inside the cranium. His eyes now seem to bulge as the tumour spreads itself around like a drunken fat scaffolder on an ikea sofa. One eye seems unable to believe the impertinence and discomfort of this, it stares out like somebody else's eye, somebody else with a serious case of permanent pique.
I'll be going to see him in the next couple of days, if he's survived that long. I'm never comfortable with the dying, they make me ashamed. Not for being alive, but for not wanting to be in their presence. I can't pretend either. I don't like to think of myself as lying to the dying, that would just be appalling behaviour. Not that I've had a great deal to do with dying people, because I always manage not to be there, it's a habit I've developed over the years.
I'll miss him. But I'll miss the living him, not the now-decrepid physical husk of his body, nor the garbled idioglossia of his mutterings and sleep-talking. I'll miss the guy who could swing his false leg on the dance floor to Elvis and make it seem fresh. I'll also miss they guy who could flirt with a girl a third of his age and make that seem the right thing to do. I won't miss his insistence that there are "too many illegal immigrants getting brand new cars off the dole", but only because he said it so often it was boring. I'll miss his jump leads that got my old volvo going on winter mornings. I'm not looking forward to the presence of grief and recriminations that all deaths seem to incur, it will interfere with the writing of my book. He'd understand that. Well, he's not going to be around to contradict me on that one. (That line would make him laugh like a drain).
Adieu mon amie.
Today's death is in the family. I won't say who. The dying may be already spoken for, but that's no excuse to go around using their real name willy-nilly.
He's dying, according to my good friend Desmond Patrick Joseph Mary Emmanuel Cullen (that's his full name and he's perfectly alive) my dying family member will succumb to his fungalising skull tumour within a few weeks. This is the end of those few weeks. And Desmond was right.
The last time I saw him was two weeks ago, he looked pretty normal to me. I saw a mobile phone camera image of him yesterday and the change was shocking. The fungaloid tumour has spread across his skull above his right eye. In the most recent photograph the tumour has obviously been making itself known across all the neighbourhoods inside the cranium. His eyes now seem to bulge as the tumour spreads itself around like a drunken fat scaffolder on an ikea sofa. One eye seems unable to believe the impertinence and discomfort of this, it stares out like somebody else's eye, somebody else with a serious case of permanent pique.
I'll be going to see him in the next couple of days, if he's survived that long. I'm never comfortable with the dying, they make me ashamed. Not for being alive, but for not wanting to be in their presence. I can't pretend either. I don't like to think of myself as lying to the dying, that would just be appalling behaviour. Not that I've had a great deal to do with dying people, because I always manage not to be there, it's a habit I've developed over the years.
I'll miss him. But I'll miss the living him, not the now-decrepid physical husk of his body, nor the garbled idioglossia of his mutterings and sleep-talking. I'll miss the guy who could swing his false leg on the dance floor to Elvis and make it seem fresh. I'll also miss they guy who could flirt with a girl a third of his age and make that seem the right thing to do. I won't miss his insistence that there are "too many illegal immigrants getting brand new cars off the dole", but only because he said it so often it was boring. I'll miss his jump leads that got my old volvo going on winter mornings. I'm not looking forward to the presence of grief and recriminations that all deaths seem to incur, it will interfere with the writing of my book. He'd understand that. Well, he's not going to be around to contradict me on that one. (That line would make him laugh like a drain).
Adieu mon amie.
posted by familyhobgoblin at 5:10 PM
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