For about a week now, i have been working a research poll involving the state of health care in our country today. It's an exhausting topic, and i'll spare you my thoughts on the subject in a broader sense. The personal is something different.
My boyfriend has family suffering from cancer right now.
I have seen people deal with it at my job caring for hospice patients. It is an ugly, horrific experience for anyone unfortunate enough to be stricken with it. There is nothing noble or dignified about it, and my heart aches for those whose lives have been devastated by it. To imagine the same random ugliness striking the man i love makes me sick with fear, and heavy with empathy for any spouse that is forced to sit and watch it happen to the most important person in their life.
My boyfriend has warned me that close members of his family are bigoted and intolerant, and that i will inevitably be rejected by them. He has gone out of his way to protect me from them, and so through no fault of ours, i am helpless to do or say anything other than love and support him alone with all that i am.
i once spent 72 straight hours alone with a terminal patient before she finally died. And all i could do was hold her hand, comb her hair, read her letters from family who did not want to be there, bible passages that she once had memorized before her mind failed, and clean her each time her body did the same.
i did these things knowing that, had she been more alert, she would have been disgusted with me for being transgender. In the short weeks i cared for her in her home, staring at her pictures and mementos gathered throughout her life in a small, religious, bigoted town, i realized that there was no point in hating her back. Instead i ending up falling in love with her like she were a family member. And when she finally died, i cried for days.
Despite being rejected simply for being different, or perhaps because of it, i have developed a belief that people should love those around them as fully and expressively as they can. Don't waste a single moment with those closest to you. Nothing should ever drive a wedge between you and the ones you love the most. Especially hate.
4 comments:
Hi Anon
Your blog is on my daily read list. I would like to comment more often but am barely able to keep my own garden tended.
You are a good person and very wise.
Your boyfriend also selected wisely. Self awareness and compassion trump any physical features that the crap shoot of genetics can throw at us.
I wish He, His family and You all the best during this time of hardship.
Thank you.
i apologize for the delay, but i've had a problem with idiots that want to mindlessly rail against me for the sake of expressing their own hate.
i've been forced to moderate my blog like others.
Hey Anonymous... My father died from cancer many years ago. Hospice sent someone to instruct us on how to insert his tube and feed him. It was surely a sad time for us, but the help of a total stranger was one of the most helpful things.
I sat with my Dad as he died, but he did die at home as opposed to a hospital room.
I appreciate your work and devotion to helping people, even in light of the prejudice that you may face in everyday life.
My Sister volunteered at the local Hospice after that.
I just wanted to say Thank You. I Love You for being there...
I lost my Mom's mom to colon cancer, spending the nights with her in the hospital as she spent 2 months dying.
I lost my Dad to pancreatic cancer; he spent 5 months in the hospital slowly dying from it.
To have you be so wonderfully giving that you can love someone despite themselves sets you on a plane far above most of the rest of the human race! May they all become so enlightened!
I'm sorry you've had to moderate...another friend has had to do the same of late, as someone took exception to her faith.
I truly thought the world would be beyond this sort of thing by now!
alan
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