Have I ever had to be the bearer of bad news? Well, yes and I guess I thought of — my mind immediately went to times when I’ve had to bear the worst news of all, which is that someone had passed away although in the cases I’m thinking about it’s — it wasn’t completely unexpected. It was just I was there and the other people weren’t.
One was when my sister died. No, why am I saying my sister died? When my mom died, my sister was out with my aunt. I mean, I had come home because I knew mom was sick. There – I mean, she was now in hospice. They thought she had about six weeks or so. So I was just home to, you know, have a visit or whatever and she ended up passing away while I was home and my sister was out running errands with my — my aunt. And so, I just had to hold it together and call, I don’t know if I called my aunt or my sister, but I said, “I think you guys should come home.” I wouldn’t say why. And they didn’t ask, which I was grateful for and they, they came home.
I’m gonna, I’m gonna go beyond the little part of the question here, just say because I have more to talk about, delivering the bad news but, that was such a — I’ve often thought about that being like this really nice gift that my mom gave me. Not that she passed away because I didn’t want that to happen. But, you know, she was – I thought she had six more weeks. So this was a visit I made, and then I expected there was gonna come a phone call I would get that it was — you know, it was time, and I would have to make that — I would have to you know, get on a plane, and, you know, make the long drive from the airport to their house in — like just consumed by grief either because she had passed away or was really close. And I dreaded that. I dreaded the prospect of being in that much, you know, anguish and feeling, you know, that emotionally beat up and having to do all of the travel. Just negotiating all of the travel. You know you hit snags. People aren’t nice. It’s not comfortable. I just — I fixated on that a lot.
It’s funny. It’s, maybe it’s sort of something that you do psychologically where you think about one thing so you don’t have to think about the other. I think it was unthinkable to ponder a world with my mom not in it. So instead of thinking about how horrible that was I just thought about how horrible travel would be, and then my mom ended up passing away when I was already home. Because I mean, I was worried traveling home to see her, but I wasn’t like — I didn’t think it was her time.
So I was just dealing with kind of the grief that I had had all along about her having cancer and a bit ticked off about that but it wasn’t, it wasn’t that level of loss yet. So she really spared me something that I had been dreading.
It was in a way a gift.