dependence (cancer sucks)

 My mother is dying before my very eyes. She is withering away, like a small shrub that knows it cannot survive the impending doom and harshness of winter.

    She is dying. And I am forgetting. I am forgetting who it is she was before. Before the cancer shrouded her being with its toxic, overbearing, and demeaning aura. I was so young. I am so young. Too young. These are the burdens of a much older soul. 
    I am still a teenager. I never got to make it past the “I’m too cool for my mom phase” that pestered me in high school. I was excited for college, for the chance to be away, to miss my home and my parents and realize what neat folks both my mom and dad are. But now it’s too late. I can’t go on cute mother-daughter dates with my mom, or really do anything at all with her for that matter. 
    She sits and she stares. And God, she hurts. It pains her so, every time she must ask for help: to stand, to sit, to go to the bathroom, to cut her food. It’s humiliating. How could it not be?
    She is living out my single greatest fear. My real one. The one that isn’t a joke, but is alive, pulsating, and existing in the deepest corner of my soul. My fear of utter dependence. Of not being able to do anything on my own. That, to me, would be hell. Living, breathing hell. I’d honestly rather be dead at that point.
    But she clings to life. This thought has been haunting me for some time now, and I must heave it off my chest. Why can’t she just die. Wow. I feel like a horribly selfish person. But it’s been nagging at me for so long. This is how I’ve always felt, though, even when the person barely hanging on was not my own mother. What is the point of living, when your existence is made possible only by those around you, when the burden they bear is so incredibly heavy? 
    Now that I say it, it rings startingly of naiveté. Of youth and innocence and the ridiculous notion that we were meant to live out this life in solitude.
     But that is not the truth. The truth, I suppose, is something bigger and grander and more reflective of God’s vision for us. She’s the one in charge anyhow. She made us for community and love and loss and pain and profound joy. She knows and sees how we hurt, and how that hurt, and tragedy and darkness and decay become just the right place for life and glory and love and light to blossom.
    In these seasons of continual grieving for what could have been, I am reminded that I cannot go through this life on my own. My mom’s complete and utter dependence is teaching me a lesson about my own perceived autonomy. Really, I should be more like my mom, as uncomfortable as it sounds to my achieving oriented and fiercely independent mind. Christ calls us into open and honest relationships with all those we care deeply about, the Holy Trinity included. I must not be afraid of vulnerability, truth-telling, asking for help when I need it, of falling hard and letting other people truly see me in my broken and messy state.