i wish i could come up with something for you to do to help but i cant right now sorry

Throughout this process of my mother's death, both before and after, my inability to ask for help stands: the currently most-frequently asked question of me, "is there anything I can do to help?" is, on the surface – and, probably, to most normal human beings with a functional brain –, an honest, earnest effort on the part of those who genuinely do wish to do something amidst a situation in which no one knows how or what to do.

But, by asking me if there's anything they can do to help – and, in spite of best intentions –, they're adding a task to my already not-insignificant task list. Indeed, in cooking, it's far easier for me to do everything myself than to parse out my process into pieces that someone else could do, no matter how much the help may help; I'm so used to shouldering everything myself that I am woefully unequipped to ask anyone for anything let alone find something in the miasmatic GTD process of admistrative death following corporeal death to delegate.

To wit: It took a near breakdown during the process of my uncle's death by glioblastoma to be willing to have it be my idea to go to a therapist; it took me holding a knife to my wrist to decide that medication was probably a good idea last summer; and, in the last week, it took four tries before I was willing to send a text to ask a cousin to check in on my grandfather the day after we learned that his daughter was going to die and I never did send a text asking a friend and/or an aunt if they had a guide, or "literature" about what to do after someone dies...the list can go on and on.

And it probably will.

my favorite part of processing the death of a parent is when others tell you how youre going to feel...

... because, clearly: all parents are the same, products of a GIVER-factory that spits out perfect carbon copies of individuals engineered precisely to serve in the role of parent and any deviation thereof is considered a manufacturing flaw...

... because, clearly: all factory-fresh carbon parents come packaged with a user manual handed to you on your way out the womb, down the chute, Superman and Marlon Brando crystalline plantings, and, in subsection 52.6, "Shutdown," you'll find step by step guidance through those five stages, towards the peace at the end and that mythological shit of the bull, closure...

... because, clearly: subsection 52.7 of the Brando crystal gives guidance to the entire fucking world on how to help others process the events of 52.6, to help them get back on the step-by-step because that's the plan and that's how things are supposed to go, step-by-step, in linear perpetuity...

... because, clearly: all relationships are, as with aforementioned parental carbon copies, the same, down to the minute, to the year, to the age you started mourning them before they actually departed this mortal coil therefore befitting such an aforementioned linear perpetuity in which a leads to b leads to c...

... because, clearly: the only opacity is clarity // the only questions are answers // the only simultaneity is linearity // the only complexity is simplicity // the only wrongs are right(s) // the only humanity is deification // the only flaws are perfections // the only

an observation upon watching my mother die at 0925 yesterday morning

In the final act of dying of natural causes the body (based only in what I could observe from my vantage point of that fucking hardback chair that held my ass for the third deathwatch vigil in as many days) takes however much time it needs to die: there's no such thing as a quick (natural) death, the internal, physiological process of dying measured in hours or days or weeks being "quick" only when balanced against the timeline of life in its entirety.

(I have my doubts that the mind/spirit/whatever has anything to do with it (waiting for the right moment, etc etc) but that’s nothing out of the ordinary for my faithless / faith-challenged heathen self.)

Life is, after all, our universal terminal illness; it is death’s only prerequisite.