Kindred wound ( Pt 2)

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A kindred wound (PT 1)

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And thus far I had become a slave to this strange malady. A malady that never abandoned me, even briefly, it still stuck on me wherever I went, and if I had a chance to escape from its chain, it would have taken me a breath to break free. This is because, since my infant life, I have never enjoyed one moment free from anguish. It was always agony, and so I did for myself what no one else could do: I endured intolerable emotions. Such that it was manifested in the moldings of my body, and people would ask the cause of my tears and solitary life only to be met by an impenetrable silence. But as of now, this mute reply no longer holds since I am filled with a necessity to tell of my grief. And as I am engulfed in a heavy feeling of sorrow, taking part in the more acute emotions of the past as if in real time, I begin my tale.

Look, I weep now, but I have not lived my life on sharp edges. It just stands to reason how another person’s life affects one’s own. This I affirm because my present life is a pure replica of my grandmother’s, to whose care I was afterwards consigned from the moment of my mother’s demise. My grandmother has always been strong, but after some time, her fervor of life slowly dwindled out as soon as the fogginess of reality was replaced with the onset of a diagnosis. A diagnosis that not only had her take in all kinds of medicines: syrups, injections, pills, and therapy, but also saw her become a human guinea pig for various technologies, with doctors always at her beck and call while trying to save her. However, all these failed to beat death, as her body had  already disintegrated with her health fully degrading from bad to worse, first slowly and then rapidly.

And as a child, I believed that her sickness was transient, fleeting into the confines of time, and in regards to that, I would compare both our lives and establish the common ground where we interlocked, and each time I did so, I would infer the same hypothesis that all suffering had an end but one that was undefined. Other times I would ascribe her illness as one of those that come with old age, and I would reflect and argue inwardly that her suffering ought to appear tolerable; but somehow, by some strange fatality, I did not know that hers was a premonition of some helpless, dreadful calamity that would not only befall her but also consume everyone who was in communion with her through blood. However, contemplating this right now has me thinking of the unknowing innocence that comes with little children, one that surely caused me to obtain a certain camouflage of stillness that made me snuff at all the hints of her illness as being a foreshadow of some miserable scene in the future.

But then, how was I to have thought otherwise when the suffering brought by this illness was the only reality I had known? It was always the same falsehood. So that the definition of a normal life in my head was not in any way synchronized with that of other people. Mine involved bum-bumping right under a torture screw, enduring the anguish firsthand as some strange disease claimed the life of my mother up until her demise, and the moment I had thought it was all over, life again forced me to experience the same torments, this time watching how it buds from the base of her skin, sprouting as it installed itself cunningly to attack and ravage its next victim; my grandmother.

Oh, cancer, it erased all morality or sanctity of religion, of a god, in our lives. God became just another word to place on the same scale as all the other words that did not matter. And after they named what should have been left unlabeled, depressive schizophrenia settled in. So that she would always retreat into her room, buried in the deepest melancholy, burrowing inside her blankets. Also, she would have the lights off in her room, and each time the door was left ajar, the darkness from her room would permeate the light in other areas of the house, including me, who felt the extreme of its loudness, crippling me.

For every time I had tried to seek belonging, I was always met with a silence so palpable that there was no trace of a grunt in her wakefulness. This silence was that of the cosmos. The silence of nothingness.It was the silence of the grave that did not take notice of anyone; she could not even sense my anxious presence. All she did was cast me away like all the outward things that lost their existence relatively to her. Thus, in vain did I reprove her mood with gentle exhortation. In vain did I pour a balm of compassion on her that would have otherwise offered her a momentary pause in her vexation. And I, who had no crumbs of energy left in me, stayed away from her. Well, not literally, but I kept at a distance, observing the alteration of her health and moods. Also, in all those months she was battling sickness, I had come to lose the satisfaction I had once derived from life, which, on the contrary, at the time was tending towards zero because in a lot of ways, her life had turned out to become poison, one which which was doomed to stealthily consume me.

Thus, each time I get to experience a paroxysm of pain synonymous with that which my matriarchs beheld, I cannot help but recall this past, to which I was just the observer, and how its grief has continued to pile up ever since I became the host. And this is how my grandmother’s memory is etched with the present state of my own life, and even as I sustain myself in telling the horror of my patched existence with the abyss open, ready to swallow me up and transport me into the blackness of time, I wonder: What if I were not to succumb to this illness? What if life was restored to me? Would I still be able to wake up the next morning and call it grace? And of what fortune would it be if I were still to face the same torments of my suffering? But be that as it may, I have always believed that while I may not look forward to things getting any better, at least I do not get afraid that I am getting worse, and in such moments, my burdensome fate fills me up. It carries me from one day to another, and on all days when I am unsure of what each day could bring, I have learned to take a little bit of truth. The truth about this being unfair but also an acceptance that such is life in all its damaged glory. (Sigh).

The End. ©️ Rehema.