Interesting how the top two songs in iTunes are also two songs featured prominently in recent episodes/promos/trailers for grey’s anatomy. I know this because I watched some of the show last week, to see what all the fuss was about, and I gotta say, I have no idea what all the fuss is about. I hear about all the millions of people who watch and love that show like a mad hatter, and I’m sure I have plenty of good friends among them. But it’s a silly frilly fruity show and I don’t get the appeal. It’s all melodrama and weepy mopey dialogue, with an endless supply of angsty frowny faces to accompany it. I only saw part of one show and I had my fill of the off-in-the-distance-is-my-destiny stares. And enough with the sweeping, slow motion camera work! cripes. ::wow, a lot of y’s in this paragraph, eh?::
Not that I don’t love slow motion, it’s one my most favorite things to imitate throughout the day, as my own theme songs play through my head. In fact, I love to hear my song, turn my head slo-mo style, and do my own off-in-the-distance-is-my-destiny stare. But that’s in the privacy of my home (or car), and not on national television for millions of yahoos to witness.
To each his own, though, right?
I suppose it’s in bad taste to criticize a TV show and then talk about my good friend’s best friend, who’s in a hospital dying of cancer right now, but hey, to each his own.
He’s neeler’s best friend, but he is my friend, too, even if we haven’t seen each other in ages.
It doesn’t feel real, though. His dying. He’s had cancer the entire time I’ve known him, but I think I always looked at it not as a real cancer, but more like TV cancer. He has it, but he’ll get better, there will be a happy ending. My time with him was always in his good, healthy periods, when treatments were working and his body strong. It was the early days, sure, but that’s how it was for us. I wasn’t around to see him get worse. And now…well, now he’s in his final days in a hospital in the city, and I can’t go see him. No. Won’t. I won’t go see him. I could. But I’m not.
I would feel like an outsider intruding on a family’s most private, delicate moment. Much was shared between the three of us and I’m lucky, because I have good memories, but it was long ago and far away and so much better than it is today. ::I’m sorry, I couldn’t help but quote meatloaf::
A visit from me, at this stage, wouldn’t be about or for him or even his friends and family. It would be about me and it would be a death knell and that isn’t something I want to do. All I can do is keep him in my thoughts and be there for neila and ready myself for the funeral.
He’s only 34. It feels wrong and unfair, but I suppose all the people surrounding someone succumbing to illness feel the same way. There is much more I want to say about this, but it’s not appropriate, it’s not the right time or place. I loved Carl, not in the ways other people do, but in my own way, for my own reasons, and the suddeness of his impending death is causing movement inside, plate-tectonic shifts at the core. I guess sometimes it takes a person’s death to realize the effect they had/have on you.
::totally bad form to mention this right now, but I first typed plate-teutonic shifts, which is pretty funny::
and truth be told, much of my heartache is for Neila, because I can only imagine what she feels, and for his parents, which I can all too easily imagine. To them I say this is the stuff that makes us strong, the scars that make us human, the pain that makes us grateful for all the things we may have taken for granted.
Better yet, I’ll leave you with the words of Hemingway: “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”