Not An Invest-able Commodity!

My last post was on August, 2013. Shortly after in September, my uncle, my mamu, my mother’s brother passed away. A stomach ache turned out to be a heart attack. A mild thumping became a throttling force towards death. My grandmother’s sickness shortly followed suit. The sickness spread from her lungs to her liver, to the gall bladder and to the spleen. The cancerous growth multiplied from her back bones and into her blood. She became a constant occupant of her bed. Her room. Her house. Breathing became excruciatingly difficult. I remember telling her once in her very last days that she looked like a fish out of water. The face puckered, gasping for breath, chest heaving in and out.

The funny thing is that the next thing she asked me was if I had anything to eat.

She died on October 27^th, the time was something around 1:15 pm. Seem’s likely, since it was rush hour and the schools and colleges had just been called off. Most of what happened that day is a blur. I remember how the day started. It wasn’t meant to be a miserable day. I drove a friend to get coffee. We gossiped, laughed, the cup tilted and some of it spilled. My legs shivering while driving back, first to the hospital, than my home, than her home. The rest of the details I do not want to divulge in. I thought at the end of that day when exhaustion was setting in that I had grieved enough. But the truth is there are no stages to grief. Grief just exists. Singularly, complacently. It cripples you. Even after acceptance and forgiveness, grief exists.

Would I be selfish to say, I wonder, that I usually miss her most terribly when I am miserable. When I am sad. When my heart has been broken, a result of someone’s doing or my own complacency.

Honestly, sometimes I think (if ever ‘I’ am to live long enough) to find myself somewhere happy and content in life, weather I’ll miss her much. It is in times of desperate need that I remember her the most. I see her face sometimes. And all I ever ask for is attention, the need to be heard and loved. And I want to bicker around with somebody, tease, push, pull to give us our share of happiness back. To fill our hearts and heads with songs of love and happiness. So I want her when I need her. I want her when it is required. I don’t know if that’s wrong or not. I’m sure it’s severely selfish.

What a joke we are! We never love what we have. We look away from kindness and love when it is offered. When it exists, we don’t exist for it at all. But we crave it when it isn’t there anymore.

This isn’t a self-abhorrent monologue. Or maybe it is. Maybe my mind has become that deranged.

People want to love and live with happy people. Less mess. Some baggage. They want to see you charm your way in. They have space and time for you if you have a joke or two in the bag. They want to know all that you have achieved so that they can determine for themselves how much of their time they can invest here. And I am not berating anybody for doing so. Just stating facts. For, how will this world spin if the spinners weren’t spinning it. For how will they reap if they do not sow. So a differentiation between a depreciating asset and an invest-able commodity needs to be made.

I’m just saying I’m not an invest-able commodity.