5/20/26: Death is bigger than language

5/20/26

Outside of love, death is a force too large, a weight too heavy, to coherently hold in the mind of man. It’s an entity that lives outside of language. Some things just exist forever incomprehensible and that’s that. 

Normally I’m much more private about everything in my life, but I need to be less so when it comes to my mom’s cancer. Secrecy feels like it’s an important part of cancer’s multitudinously encroaching toxicity. The more I share about cancer and how I’m feeling in my life in general as it remains ever-present, the less it eats away at me. And no matter what I do to try to pretend it’s not happening, the existence of cancer trying to kill the person I love the most has been eating away at me this whole time with the sharpest teeth imaginable. And a lot of days I don’t really know who I am anymore or what really matters except for her not dying. 

 

There are five tumors on the left side of her brain. Everyone has been talking about the tumors in her brain so matter of factly, and yet it’s all such deathly terrifying language. Cancer has been dropped at our feet like the opposite of a gift; like the weight of a bottomless pit has been dropped directly below us and all we're doing now is falling. And we have to exist while falling, which makes no sense and feels endlessly wrong in the body because it is.

 

The tumors are spread out in a way so as to eradicate surgery as an option. Radiation is what we’re doing. It begins on May 26th and ends June 8th. It’s for two weeks everyday except for the weekends. 

 

The cancer trial my mom has been in for awhile now wasn’t scanning her brain this whole time even though the kind of cancer she has easily spreads to the brain. We don’t understand why they weren't scanning her brain. They kept telling us it was getting better. That things were stable and/or shrinking enough to be rightfully hopeful. Meanwhile, like an evil garden with a furious blossoming, tumors were growing in her brain. There are a lot of specific people now who hold medical degrees that I loathe beyond words and will never forgive. This all feels like it’s about to break. 

 

 

I anthropomorphize the brain tumors. I picture them all in ugly suits having a business meeting in a stuffy office and agreeing on exactly what kind of fuckery they're going to get up to that day. 

“Just sitting here with brain cancer trying to eat a biscotti.” -my mom earlier today.

When I was first told about my mom’s metastasized brain cancer it made death feel the most vehemently tangible it's ever felt before; nauseously unequivocal. This wave of a feeling ran through my body that’s hard to describe. It’s like a thunderstorm in your body. And it's like when you’re floating and nothing feels real except you know it’s all very real, and you just want this horrible Twilight Zone episode to end but it’s not ending. Instead it's just getting worse and scarier.

 

The feeling of being told my mom’s cancer has metastasized to her brain is a twin to the original feeling of first being told she had cancer two and half years ago. 

 

 

In an extremely melancholic haze I numbly procured top-notch junk food tonight: Lucky Charms, Drumsticks, and Ham & Cheese Hot Pockets. I at least ate my Lucky Charms/Hot Pocket dinner from ceramics I made. (As we all know, homemade ceramics make junk food healthier.)

 

I’ll let you know what my next shitty food lineup is. I'm not sure I can top this particular line-up, though.

What comes to mind right now is powdered donuts and Cheetos. There are so many spectacular shitty food items in existence. The shitty possibilities are comfortingly endless.