Your 20s are your Freedom Years

It's currently 1:00 am on a warm Friday night. It's summertime and my high school friends are home for the summer.

Guess what I'm doing.

I'm sitting in bed, alone in my apartment. Just sitting here. Thinking "How in the world is my mom actually dying? Is this real?"

The answer is yes. Yes, it's real. Yes, she's dying. Yes, she actually looked my dad in the eyes today and said "Will you take me to the cemetary where my dad is buried? I want to choose a plot."

Raise your hand if witnessing your mom say this would make you feel at least mildly uncomfortable.

I hope your hand is in the air.

This is my college life. These are my young adult years. This is how I'm spending it.

I found this picture online the other day. I thought it was appropriate:

I'm only 20, but this could not be further from the truth for me, at least what I've been experiencing so far in my 20s.

When was the last time I was selfish? And I don't mean to say that in a way like I'm a selfless angel. I would love to be able to be selfish right now. I would love to be able to have a normal college life right now. To live in the dorms and go to parties on the weekend. To have the only stressful thing in my life be homework and midterms. To feel free.

That's really what your 20s are about. Your 20s may be your "selfish" years, but more impotantly, they're you "freedom" years.

I was given a taste of freedom for 3 months. Just 3 months, then it was ripped out of my chest, and it's never coming back. Now life is a series of responsibilities and obligations. And it's not like all of the responibilities/obligations I'm exepriencing are always being pushed on my by external forces. In fact, most of them are internal. I just feel like I have a responsilibity and obligation to be there for my mom. (So if my aunt could stop telling me things like "Good job Misha. You're being a good daughter today", I would really appreciate it.)

I was only in Chicago are 3 months, and it's been a year and a half since then, but I still can't even hear someone mention that city without my mind being flooded with just the pure awesomeness it felt like to be 2,000 miles away from home and having the freedom to do whatever I wanted.

So far, I've been relatively successful in blocking those thoughts out of my head. I have bigger things to think about now.

Sometimes I wish my mom could have gotten sick before I left for college. At least that way I would never have expereinced the freedom. I would have no idea what I was missing.

But I just have to learn to accept things for how they happened. No point dwelling on the past, right? I try not to, but the past sneaks into my thoughts from time to time.

I know, I know. It's been a year and a half, I should be used to it by now. But I can't get used to it. Because my number one question still hasn't been answered. And it will never be answered.

Why did this happen to my mom?

I hate brain cancer. There are absolutely no known causes of brain cancer. There's no way to prevent it.

I guess that could be seen as a positive. It's not like my mom wasn't being irresponible. In fact, she was quite the contrary. She was always one notch away from being a health nut. Two years ago, she'd be the last person in the world you'd expect to get stage four cancer.

But it happened to her.

I can't believe my mom is dying.

It's easy to say that she's dying of a disease, of cancer. But I like to think of it as Cancer is killing her. When I hear people say stuff like "he died of cancer", it sounds way too passive to me. The person didn't just die, something killed them. There's always a Cause of Death.

And when the Cause of Death is something like cancer, it's so interesting to think about. It's been a year and a half and my mom's cancer is still winning this fight againt modern medicine. It's obviously working very hard, because we're throwing everything we got at it. It's a persistant, motived, and diligent Cancer. Kind of how I describe myself in a job interview.

But when I'm applying for a job, I have a goal and benefits in mind. My goal is to get a job so that I can get paid (the benefits).

But when I think about cancer and how hard it works, I see absolutely no benefit that it could possibilty be getting from this expereince. What is Cancer's goal? Just to kill another kind-hearted humand being? What's the point? What benefit does Cancer get out of killing my mom?