Sadness

I'm a facebook addict, and have been for a good while, though it took me longer to really get IN to facebook than most. But I'm fully hooked now, and through FB I've been able to find long lost friends and old classmates, ex-boyfriends, family, and people I know from back home, but don't really see that often. It's nice to be able to keep in touch, or at least read the statuses of all of these people.

But for months now, I've been watching the transition of a friend of mine -via FB- from a happy guy with a great life and the best relationship, to a single guy with lots of anger and doubt, and a lost love he can never get back. It's heartbreaking.

I believe it was late last year when my friend's partner was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He'd been a smoker all of his adult life, as I understood, and had been diagnosed with a brain tumor --a product, if I'm not mistaken, of lung cancer having silently spread throughout his body and deciding to settle in his brain, as well as other places. This beautiful friend of mine, and his beautiful love now had a third entity in their relationship. The trips they took to beautiful places slowed and then stopped, as the entity crept along and took over. Surgeries were performed, treatments and drugs prescribed and tried, but in the end there was nothing they could do as the entity took over. Once graceful steps had become shufflings and stumbles, once sound ideas had been replaced with obsessive behaviours, and the youthful vigor was slowly drained from entirety. My beautiful friend had gone from loving partner, to loving carer, in a matter of months.

My friend is an amazing writer, working for a magazine that I pick up from time to time when I'm lucky enough to be home visiting, and I've always marvelled at his articles. When everything struck their lives, my beautiful friend --whether he consciously did it or not-- began to write about it all. He wrote about how he felt, how his partner felt; how this day was alright, or that day had been hell. He explained it all clearly but with a strength and love that shone through brightly. Looking back, now, I can clearly see the progression of the entity, and how my beautiful friend's partner was slowly, relentlessly taken from him.

I'll never forget when my beautiful friend's partner died. There was merely a short sentence of an update, something so subtle that had you no idea what was going on, you'd have thought it a positive statement. I had considered quoting it in this post, but I think I'll leave it out. It's not MINE to be sharing; I just needed to relay a bit of background.

Through my beautiful friend's clear and thoughtful writing you could tell that when his partner died it was the most decimating, liberating, confusing, hurtful and raw journey he'd ever had forced on him. Everyone's heart must have died just a little bit with his, when reading his delicate and loving description of his partner's passing. I know mine did.

What I saw next, though, worried me a bit, but I knew it was the natural way out of the situation he'd been in. He seemed a bit relieved, although that's not the ONLY thing he was feeling, I'm sure, but he seemed like a burden had been lifted --hadn't it, anyway? Surely death has to be better than the pain and suffering leading up to it, especially when that's the only possible outcome?! His writing of course had slowed down, but seemingly happy pictures of my beautiful friend started surfacing on his friends' FB pages; his smiles seemed genuine, his face relaxed.

But I knew (from personal experience) that that relief would eventually subside and the rest of what he was feeling from it all would come through: Sadness, confusing resentment, hatred and burning contempt for the entity that had ruined his life and taken his partner from him.

That's where it is now. I'm watching my beautiful friend go through his depression, his mourning, his loss, with the mixed emotions that only death gives us. His strong writing has taken a break for now, being mere responses to a meme he has posted. His brusque answers are a harsh departure from his demeanor; he is again telling us how he is feeling through his writing. And it breaks my heart to see his suffering. His offhanded comments about anti-depressants and counselling, his legitimately bitter, acidic remarks about not being able to marry the one he wholly loved, simply because they were both men, and the fact that he mentioned not getting out of bed until 1pm, all tangle together into an easily seen state of confusion and depression my beautiful friend has fallen into. My feelings cry for him.

This post doesn't REALLY have anything more to do with Facebook than the fact that that's how I'm most easily able to keep up with my friend; what REALLY matters here is that a beautiful, lovely, gorgeous, and vivacious man, easily full of all the kindness and love and thoughtfulness that people STRIVE to have, is hurting. An unfair, unrelenting, piercing hurt.

And I'm having to deal with my own feelings of unfairness for what he's gone through, and continues to go through.

I love you, Egg. Hang in there.