It’s fortunate no one can peer inside my head and take a look around. There’s too much there for me to even begin to sort out and when I try to think it’s just so crowded that I’m exhausted even trying. I know that I can get through anything, I know this. And I also feel like any time I falter, when I even let any of this get to me, I feel I’m being just like my mom — the eternal victim, the martyr — and I think that I’m weak and cowardly and why is it that I have no strength. And it’s so hard for me to ask for help, to ever even let anyone know that I need help and I can’t let myself be that vulnerable, but then I ask for help because I don’t know what else to do and when I open myself up like that and I’m rejected, well. I don’t know. I feel foolish and selfish to say that the hurt of that just compounds the hurt I’m already feeling and all I want to do, then, is to protect myself. To never allow myself to feel that much again.

It’s just that it’s so much. The crowding in my head makes it difficult to be strong enough for any of it, much less all of it, all at once, descending on me like the night, like silence, like sadness, like desolation.

And I know I will get through all of it. And maybe that’s why I feel so weak, so dumb to even let it be visible. I should keep it all in, hide it, get through it, because I will. Why bother anyone else with it all. If I don’t have strength, what do I have?

And I want to be the strong one, the competent one. I don’t want to be weak and whiny and not able to find my own way. When I go home, I only remember more. My family looks to me to solve everything. I’m glad to help. I am. But it’s such weight sometimes.

To be the responsible one. I’ve given some of it up. In some ways it’s freeing and in other ways the guilt just follows me, a shadow, forever reminding me of my selfishness. My mom doesn’t talk to me anymore. My fault for no longer helping her? Or hers for expecting it? I see things that aren’t done because I didn’t step in and I know I just have to let it go.

I’ve already come to terms with not being everyone’s savior. (And going back to read that entry and seeing that the date was a year and a half ago, I guess I feel like I keep whining about the same things over and over and I just need to shut the fuck up already. Maybe not today. But soon.)

And while being confronted with death helps me realize that there is a shared experience with family you can’t get anywhere else, it also reminds me that life is fleeting, it doesn’t last, one day it’s over and that was all you had. Time is something you can’t get back, can’t keep it, can’t save it in a bottle for a rainy day. You spend each moment as it happens and then it’s gone.

That’s all you get. And nothing changes that.

I’ll have to sort through it all, all the crowding in my head and I’ll be fine. I’ll get through this. And there’s a lot of good too. But sometimes the noise of the rest of it makes all of that hard to hear.

Sometimes, I wonder if I am the most selfish person in the world. And at those times, I’m not sure if I’m just comparing the current me to the former me — the me who lived to make everyone else around me happy, so of course I seem selfish compared to that — or if I really am as selfish as I think as backlash from that former me. Maybe it’s a little of both. Sometimes, I can almost watch myself objectively and see things I should do or things that would be better for someone else, and I then also watch myself not do any of those things.

I probably should have gone to California earlier. I could have helped out. Taken away the burden. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Sure I had things to do here and it worked out better to wait until today to go, but I also know I could have put everything on hold. I could have made a way to make it down there. But it was too much. It was hard enough to deal with my own sadness. I couldn’t add the responsibility of my entire family on top of that. Was that too selfish? Probably. I don’t know. But it was all I could take.

I look at my life as it stands now and nearly everything is the result of being selfish. Perhaps I “should” have stayed married with the vows and the til death til us part and the minister pulling us aside after the ceremony and telling us that he’d never had a couple he’d married divorce. But I just wasn’t willing to live that life and I had changed too much and wasn’t willing to go back.

I could have stuck with my job and that other job and my last boyfriend and he told me that I couldn’t commit and would end up old and alone and maybe. Maybe he’s right. But I just couldn’t sacrifice my happiness and living the life I wanted for the sake of doing the right thing and not being alone.

Will I regret it? I don’t think so. Which is part of why I wonder if I’m the most selfish person in the world. Shouldn’t I regret, a little, not doing all of these things that I should?

I’m reading this book, Stumbling on Happiness, and it’s all about the psychology of how we feel and how we think and one section is about regrets. And it says that studies have found that we rarely regret things we do. Rather, we regret things we don’t do.

And I don’t regret things I do. Of course, the book also talks about how we rationalize experiences we have, and maybe that’s all I’m doing. But I think I’d rather try and fail. Even the things that have devastated me the most, that have brought me pain that I thought I couldn’t bear, even that, I don’t regret any of it. The joy, the experience, how my life has changed, it was all worth it.

I can’t spend my life avoiding pain anyway, so may as well go full in. Why avoid things because of the risk of pain — all of life is a risk, right and you’re going to run into pain no matter how much you try to protect yourself. We can spend it not experiencing anything or going for it.

And I think that, and then I wonder again about selfishness. It feels so much like “fuck the consequences” and we should care about consequences, right? But I’m thinking of the consequences of not trying anything, not risking anything, of staying in the same place, of not knowing anything new, of dying the same as I am today and looking back and not experiencing life. And I guess that consequence seems worse than of trying everything I can.

I wonder if I’m wrong. And maybe I really am the most selfish person in the world. But we all want to be happy. I’m just doing the best I can.

I don’t know how to face death, not any of it. Not the no longer living part or the what comes after part or the being without someone part or the whole complicated question of the best way to handle my life knowing that death is coming one day. I don’t know how to do any of it so I keep that all locked up somewhere far away and I try to never visit, not ever, not even for a little bit, to wonder what it might be like.

Only now I’m sitting in a hospital room and the only sounds are the machines feeding into the tubes going into my grandmother’s body and the ones that monitor if she’s breathing and her heart is pumping.

A few minutes ago, she clutched my hand and looked directly into my eyes. “Will you help me?” she said as clear as a bright blue sky and she said my name which only made it harder because that meant she knew exactly who I was, and some part of her knew exactly where she was and why.

It would be easier to think otherwise. After all, only moments before, she asked me what time the people from Bank of America were coming and then demanded I tell her what they said. And a few minutes later asked if I had let anyone know that she was running late and when I said that it was OK and not to worry about it she said “but other passengers are on board.”

She has these great moment when she laughs and smiles. She opened her eyes and asked if she was still living. I said she was and she said, “thank you” and smiled and closed her eyes again. But then she has other moments when you ask if she’s OK and she looks at you like you’re crazy and says she’s miserable and wants to go home. And, indeed, it’s a crazy thing to ask when the answer is so obvious.

I sat outside with my grandfather for a while. We lit two more cigarettes and he talked about how what he really wanted was for her to beat this. And then he said he knew that would be a miracle, but maybe at least she could come home. I don’t know. I know this isn’t something she can beat. I don’t even know if she can come home.

Yesterday, he was asking me about where I had been traveling. Have I been to Italy? No, I haven’t been to Italy.

“I always wanted to go to Venice,” he said.

And it struck me that he never, now, would go to Venice.

It made me want to drop everything and go everywhere and do everything I ever had wanted to do. Because the day will come that it will be me in that hospital room and I don’t want to say I always wanted to go to Venice.

And then he kissed his wife and told her that he loved her more than anything in the world and I thought about that too. Having someone who loves you more than anything else in the world isn’t something you can do or somewhere you can go. You can’t save up to buy it at the store. And that’s my other fear, of course. Besides my fear of dying, there’s my fear that I’ll do that dying alone and that there will never be a time when someone loves me more than anything in the world.

When you’re around death, everything else is dwarfed in comparison, but that’s mostly for everyone else but the person who is dying. My grandmother doesn’t want to be tangled in tubes and to be stuck in a bed and she keeps asking would someone please let her up to go to the bathroom. Everyone ignores her. Surely these things aren’t important next to DEATH, but they matter to her. When my cousins came in to visit, she tried to take the tube that brings her oxygen out of her nose.

“You need to leave that in. It helps you breathe.”

“But it doesn’t look attractive.”

We forget. We are thinking of the big thing and don’t remember that the small things still matter.

Often, when she slips away from the present, from the hospital bed, from not being home (and she is often in the present, which makes the times she’s not that much harder), she slips way back to when she was young. “Is this our first house, when we moved to LA right after we got married? You remember, we just needed a small apartment, just the two of us?”

It’s hard on my grandpa. “Don’t you remember, sweetheart?” He wants her to be better.

Everyone’s been coming by to see her. My cousin said that her favorite thing to do at Christmas is to go to our grandparents’ house. Not because it’s exciting, “because let’s be honest — it’s not” but because it’s them, their house. She had lived with them for a time when her mom went crazy. I have the same feelings of their house as home. Their house was the first place I remembered living.

I was talking to a friend on the phone on the way to the hospital today. I remembered that the town the hospital is in is the same one where I had my wisdom teeth out. Which reminded me that it was my grandparents who picked me up from the dentist and took me to their house and took care of me in the days after.

All of us cousins have had such fucked up lives and childhoods and families. Our one point of stability has been our grandparents. And now they’re slipping away from us and they need help and the same people — our parents, their children — who in many ways failed us as kids are in many ways failing them now. And there’s only so much any of us can do.

As much as I try not to think about death, I also mostly try not to think too much about God. Thinking about God is like thinking about the beginning of time or the edges of the universe and I can’t wrap my head around it and make it make sense. I know God academically. I can quote any scripture you’d like. But where my grandmother goes from here? I just can’t make sense of any of it.

So, I hold my grandmother’s hand and I feed her jello and give her ice chips when she’s thirsty. In her lucid moments, we talk about her cat and how the hospital room sucks and in other moments, I tell her that I’ve taken care of making my cousin a sandwich so she doesn’t have to do it. And I talk to my grandfather about what it must be like to visit Italy. And none of it makes any sense at all.

“Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention.”

What the hell is that even supposed to mean? I mean seriously. I get the whole “I did it my way” thing, but have you really listened to the lyrics to that song? I think poor Frank may have a few too many not-quite-legal substances when he came up with that one. Or quite possibly he didn’t actually write the song, but he must have been drunk on something every time he sang it because I haven’t heard stories of how he would stop in the middle of the song and say, “the fuck? ‘But through it all, when there was doubt, I ate it up and spit it out’? Which was it? Did I eat it or did I spit it out? I can’t sing under these conditions! Find me lyrics that make sense or I’m outta here.”

So regrets. I mostly don’t have them. I don’t regret things that I do, even if it’s been wrong and I’ve failed and I’ve had to start all over again. I think I would regret not doing things. I was looking back over this journal and I came across this entry from January when I said that for as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to live on the water, wanted to sit outside and write to the sound of the waves. I said “The older me doesn’t quite believe as much as the younger me did that anything is possible.” And here’s where I liken myself to crazy Frank and say, what the fuck was I thinking? I no longer believe that anything is possible?

I would like to go back in time and smack the ten-months-younger me in the head and tell her that as a matter of fact, I do now live on the water and I’m listening to the waves as I write this RIGHT THIS SECOND, so maybe ten-months-younger me shouldn’t be so smug and sighing and know it all about things. Maybe anything really is possible.

I still get depressed when I fail. But I know I’m going to fail sometimes. There’s something to be said for being safe and comfortable and knowing what’s coming next, but then there are times when you just say fuck it, I’m going for it. And sometimes it’s all you could have wanted and sometimes it’s unexpected joy and sometimes you fail, but even then, you end up somewhere you couldn’t have imagined, and you’re moving forward to a new place and maybe failure’s just another word for nothing left to lose. Or wait, that was freedom. Freedom’s another word for nothing left to lose. Failure must be that word for the beginning of something new.