Some days you can smile and laugh and enjoy yourself so thoroughly that nothing can dampen your mood. Everything is bright and cheerful and you're just so so happy that this is your life, this is your day and no one will ruin that for you.
Then there are those days you want nothing more than to run screaming from the room. To find a quiet, isolated place where you can curl up and forget everything and everyone and just cry or sleep and get away from it all.
Sometimes those days stretch into weeks, then fortnights, then months and even years.
It has been a very bad couple of months with only the rare few happy days scattered within.
The worst and most heartbreaking moment of the last few months has been losing my cousin in a terrible accident.
He was older than me, a bright young man with a big future all planned out. He had a family that adored him and a little boy that idolized him.
After losing both their parents and their uncle in a motor vehicle accident only a few years ago, the family of four were moving on, starting their lives, enjoying the little things and the big things.
And so our family is hit with yet another tragedy when this man, my cousin, passed away a little over a month ago.
He was staying at his brothers house. In the early hours of the morning he was awoken by the dogs barking in the yard. He lent on the window to try and quiet them down. It was old glass that is not allowed to be used anymore. The glass shattered, cutting his right arm and severing the main artery under his arm.
He bled out quickly and was technically dead for 40 minutes before the paramedics managed to restart his heart.
He was taken to hospital but he was not conscious.
That night the doctors told us that he had no brain activity but were going to bring his temperature up to try the tests again.
We visited him along with the vast majority of our extended family. We are large in number and i do believe the hospital was shocked at the amount of people waiting in the hallway throughout the next few days.
He looked as though he were sleeping. If one ignored all the tubes and machines, you'd think that if you simply said his name loud enough, he'd wake up, grumble about more sleep and roll over. But he did not wake up. He did not stir.
That night it was confirmed that there was no brain activity and that he would not wake up.
They kept him hooked up to the machines due to being an organ donor and to give some friends and family time to say their last goodbyes.
His boy.. His little boy knew there was something wrong but couldn't quite understand why his father was not waking up.
His funeral, held at the same place as his parents and laid to rest in the same graveyard as his parents, was beautiful. The song Hey Brother by Avicii was used at the ceremony and fit him perfectly. His little boy was the first to place a rose upon his fathers grave, standing close to the edge and looking to his auntie for an explanation as to why this happened. Why did he have to say goodbye to his dad? As soon as he started to cry, the heartbreaking love and loss plain on his face, my mask crumbled.
It is.. Hard.. Always hard to lose a family member, a friend, someone you knew from a very young age, a face you saw often growing up and whose sisters and brother held so highly i doubt he could even see the ground. He was the glue of the family. He kept an eye on his siblings, protected them, helped them up when things got rough.
I wish with all my heart that this had never happened, that he had gotten the chance to watch his son grow up, to catch more fish and to cause more trouble, to fall in love again and again and to get married and perhaps have even more children. To have one more beer with his mates and to play one more game of footy with his team. To grow old. To know that his mother and father would have been so proud of the man he had become.
But life is unexpected. It is cold and hurtful, loving and beautiful, hilarious and infuriating, wonderful and sadistic, full of people you wish to meet, others to avoid and people you simply chance upon and become so close that they share that life with you.
I am still numb to the whole ordeal. I cannot seem to accept it.. and I think it will be a very long time before i can.
Peace.. I wish him peace.
Posted by
Sierra Lima Juliet Tango
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