October 2022: Death & Stage 4 cancer

 

The 2 things that defined October were: my grandma's death and my longtime friend's cancer diagnosis. Everything else, like my work problems and bunny litter training adventures, seemed to have happened on a different plane entirely.

My grandma has been in hospital for most of the past year. On 7 October we were told "anytime now" so we went to visit her. She was unable to open her eyes or speak or move, as usual, but when I sat at her bed and touched her, tears streamed down her face. Her left arm was about 3x the size of her right, horribly bruised and disfigured from the constant blood tests. It's disgusting. What's the point of poking needles repeatedly into a dying person?

Anyway, she died on 11 October. I was spamming my family WhatsApp chat group with pictures of bread from Lavender bakery and my mum replied, "ah ma passed away." Then it was the wake, which was a shitshow and a sham. And then she was gone. I'm glad her suffering has ended.

Shortly after that, I got word that my one-time best friend has stage 4 cancer. It isn't the sort of thing you can be hopeful about or cheerily make post-chemo plans together. In fact, the doctor gave her 3 months to live. She is in pain.

I had cut her out of my life for the past several years, ignoring her emails and birthday cards. We didn't have a major fallout or anything, but she's not mentally well and I felt I didn't have bandwidth to deal with that. I guess I thought that maybe we would reconnect and be friends again one day in another stage of life, as we had several times before. Now it looks unlikely that we'll get that chance.

Yet life did go on in October. The month started out promising. I bought myself a shiny new bicycle, meaning to get back into food delivery again. But Q4, it turns out, is low season. Everyone's either travelling or going out to meet friends, not staying home to eat $12 meal deals.

I took the opportunity to explore other kinds of work. I applied for part-time jobs and I might start one soon, at a bookstore. I listed bunny boarding services on Carousell and have gotten my first job for that. We'll see how things go.

What about freelance writing? I've given it a lot of thought and decided it's time for me to move on. Not completely, because the money is great, but I want to downgrade to merely a side hustle. Really, the only thing I like about it is that it pays well. The more I write for myself, the more I dislike writing for someone else. I'm currently setting up an arrangement where I take only assignments from my friend's agency instead of working with clients directly. Exciting times!

Jon and my relationship is evolving noticeably. Maybe it's because we're doing The Artist's Way. We used to minimise our differences for the sake of being one unit; over the past weeks, we have been asserting our individual desires more strongly. It's really nice, actually, to experience and enjoy our differences. By the way, we've been together for 5 years now, which is quite mind-boggling.