Last monday, brian, the youngest brother of marc who is one of my bestfriends, went to consult a doctor because he was not feeling well. He was diagnosed with leukemia.
Yesterday, two days after, he passed away.
He was the good one. The one who made sure that his sisters were safe. The one who always looked out for his ate marc.
He was 25 years old.
On saturday, his parents are coming home to bury their son.
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When she was barely two years old, my sisters kidneys started failing. She was put on steroids and was scheduled for a transplant.
My mother and my sister had to move to manila to be able to get medical treatment. Me and my brothers stayed with my grandparents in the province. My dad went back and forth to make sure that we were all okay.
After being away for a week, my dad went home to manila and rushed to my sisters crib. My mother walked in on him crying quietly as he watched my sister sleeping. He told my mother later that he cried because when he saw my sister that night he didnt even recognize her at first because of the steroids. And that for the first time in his life, my father - the supreme alpha macho male - felt helpless.
My sister didnt need a transplant after all, but her kidneys were still weak. She was in and out of the hospital for the first ten years of her life. She was not allowed to play, or to swim or to go to regular school because it might have aggravated her condition. She grew up on tasteless food because her kidneys couldnt take salt.
She finally got better in her teen years. And she grew up to be an amazing, beautiful, smart, funny human being. We all hoped that that would be the end of her suffering.
Two years ago, they found cysts in her ovaries, one of which was bigger than her uterus. Nobody in the family said it out loud but i knew we all felt the same thing. When is life ever gonna give her a chance to really live life?
I remember i called tracy the night i found out and i remember crying to her cos i couldnt understand why life was picking on my kid sister.
Less than a year after the cysts in her ovaries were taken out, they found new ones in her uterus.
She cried that day she found out. My sister, who has always been strong, cried inconsolably that day. And my mother, who sat and cried beside her too, just kept telling her it was going to be okay.
My sister is truly the strongest person i know. She fights her battles bravely with a smile on her face. If she ever did complain about all that has happened to her, she kept it to herself.
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I often wonder how people like my sister and brian are chosen. Deesj believes that things happen randomly to random people. Cos really, when you look at life, nothing really seems fair.
Cos why was i spared and my sister not?
But I've also always believed that life is tougher on the strong because the strong can take it. So maybe, just maybe, i've been spared because i'm weak. Because maybe, if i were living my sisters life, i would just complain and be bitter.
I once read a story about a hunchback who was madly in love with a beautiful maiden. And the maiden couldnt bring herself to love him because he was ugly. One night, the hunchback told her that he was really suppose to be born handsome. But before he was born, the gods took him and showed him the reflection of the girl he was going to fall madly in love with, the girl was plain and deformed. So he prayed to the gods to transfer all her deformities to him because he didnt want her to grow up being scorned by other people. And so he was born a hunchback and she a beautiful maiden.
Maybe my sister told God before we were born to spare me and my siblings of any real heartaches. To just give it to her because she's the strongest of all of us.
I know that really sounds trite and stupid but sometimes i resort to the trite and stupid to try to understand why things are the way they are.
(god umiyak ba ako habang sinusulat ko to?)
(at god may kahabaan noh?)
3 comments:
Ika nga ni Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls, the less i seek my source for some definitive, the closer i am to fine.
Life rocks and sucks at the same time. I know a friend of a friend who died of lung cancer in her early 20's, never smoked a stick of cigarette in her entire short life, didn't even live with anyone who smoked. Haay.
And sometimes it just rains frogs.
Ets.
( )
wow, ur stories are really sad. but i do know that life is never fair & easy and things don't happen just by random. it's all a part of god's plan, no matter how unfair you might think He is...but yes, it still baffles me wen bad things like cancer happen to people u know don't deserve it...
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