I haven't written in this blog for a while. A whole month in fact. Sometimes, a week won't go by that I don't have some thought I want to put down in here. But my Head Aches blog/vlog has been taking priority.
I want to explore that concept of priority. It's hard to know what are your priorities, and the difference between what they are and what they should be. Most of us feel strong obligations to one thing or another: work, family, money. My strongest obligation at the moment is family, particularly my grandparents. With my grandad now in a care home, I need to be around to go and see him, and also to take my nan to see him on occasion. My sister only gets the opportunity to see them at the weekends, and if I was working full-time I would be in the same position.
I'm struggling with not working. The thing is I'm not not working, I'm just not in my usual environment of a full-time 9-7/8/9 job in TV. I'm having to work off my own initiative to work for my friend on her business, on a film project. I have to sit myself down and say "Right, today I need to get this done" or "Ok this afternoon I'm going to get that finished." It's not easy, and the house can be full of distractions like the washing up or the hoovering. Often I go and sit in my local library to be free of distraction. But I am going to have to learn how to work from home.
Much as I miss working in TV, and I miss the money, I want to be volunteering like I do each week - something that working in TV would not allow. I want to be around for my grandparents, because we don't know how long my grandad has got, and my nana is now alone in her house. For a woman that does not want to make her own family, I am curiously devoted to the one I already have.
When I got home in May, I felt like I'd made the wrong decision coming home, and my plan was to get back to work and save up enough to get away and out of the country again to somewhere else by the New Year. And then my mother told me my grandad had cancer. Lots of cancer. Cancer that will kill him (though won't technically won't kill him). Terminal, aggressive, untreatable cancer. They started chemo in order to give him more time. But only a few sessions in they said it was too aggressive and chemo would make no difference.
There was no more bargaining for time. This is it.
And so he sits in his care home, in pain, uncomfortable, but being given more care and attention than we could if he were at home. He says he's ready to die tomorrow, but tomorrow doesn't come.
But I'm not ready.
Having a family is so selfish. You create people who are bound to you by blood and more often than not care about you like no other in the world. And sometimes your kids die before you and that's tragic, no parent should have to bury their child. But why should the children have to bury the parents? Is it part of growing up? An inevitable part of the human experience - the loss of a loved one. An experience that cannot be ignored, that cannot be got around. Unless you are an orphan hermit perhaps.
And I can easily empathise with people, fictional or otherwise. Watching the beginning of season 7 of Castle I was crying even though I knew what was going to happen. But the heartbreak of Beckett's face - it cut through to my own heart.
I'm not ready for this loss. How can I possibly become ready?
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