...and they LIVED happily ever after.

Let me start this with my normal disclaimer. The views expressed in this blog are mine and mine alone. I'm not here to hold your hand, coddle you, or overall make you happy. I'm just passing on some things I've learned over the years. If you don't like it then you may as well stop reading it. If you disagree with it I really don't care. These are my thoughts and stories; You can't have them.

Now that the silly stuff is taken care of, let me ask a rhetorical question; Have you ever had an experience in that you never wanted to have to deal with, but had always known, eventually, that you would? Don't worry, I have too. Now I'm going to touch briefly on a few of my own tales of woe that I've survived over the years. Most have absolutely no happy ending and deal with death. If that's too much for you, stop reading now. I promise I'm going somewhere with this, so just bear with me.

Early on in life I felt the icy touch of death's merciless embrace. Not personally, of course. But at the age of nine years old my baby sister Cori-Anne was taken from me. It was the week before thanksgiving and I was off of school. I came downstairs and found my grandmother crying. I don't remember everything that happened, but I know I had lost someone I loved. I didn't really understand what that meant at the time except that she wouldn't be around anymore. I was sad, of course, but it was nice to have all my cousins and aunts and uncles around.

In seventh grade, I believe, I lost my uncle Neil. He was my grandmother's brother and was around 70 years old or so at the time. At that moment I lost my first role model. I absolutely loved him. He was so much more awesome than every other aunt and uncle I have. He was athletic, intelligent, brilliant, and had that old school swag that you totally associate with Frank Sinatra. He was everything I wanted to learn from but left before I could take any of it. I've yet to meet a person with more class than him. I felt so sad afterwards, I hardly talked to anyone.

But to make matters worse, a few years later I almost lost my grandmother. During the summer of my 10th grade year, we could out she had an aneurysm in her head the size of a golf ball. So she was left with two options; she could either have a surgery with a 10% chance of success or she could wait until the tumor exploded and killed her anyway. Well, you can't say my grandmother isn't ballsy. She said her goodbyes to all of us and went under. It was terrifying. She was under for nine hours. I sat in the waiting room the entire time waiting. It was the most terrifying day of my life. She made it out, amazingly. But it was a harrowing experience that none of us walked away from unscathed. Plus the half a year of being in a recovery ward and me staying at home mostly by myself. It was tough.

Tougher, though, was the morning in January 2001 where I went downstairs and found not only my grandmother crying, but my mother and my aunt Nadine sobbing. Nadine's daughter Chrissy, AKA my best friend in the whole world, my oldest sister, and my favorite cousin had died that night of... stuff. I'd rather not talk about that. I wasn't the only extra kid my grandmother raised. Chrissy and I were partners in crime. We fought not only each other, but everybody else. She had moved out a few years previous and I barely saw her anymore, but our bond never really broke. Well, suffice to say I dropped to the floor the moment I was told and cried. Then I cried more. And more. And then before I knew it I was standing on the alter at church singing. And then I was crying again. I'm fuzzy on some of the details these days, but I know I sang the entire thing. Not well, mind you. I'd have never made it without Kelly(Lol she didn't even like me back then) and Mr. D singing up in the loft with me. But I got all the way through it. To this day though, I can't think about this without nearly bursting into tears.

All the way through it until a year and a half later, just after I graduated, I lost my second best friend in the entire world. Her name was Cindy and she was my cousin too. She was about 15 years older than me but I got along with her better than most people my own age. I spent most of my summers at her house because she had a computer and I didn't at the time. We played cards together and she dragged me to Denny's all the time where we'd talk about life's meanings. I think she's the reason I'm a night owl. But suddenly, poof! She's dead. Hell, I'd been hanging out with her the day before at a family birthday party. It completely blindsided me and suddenly I was crying again. But then I wasn't. The tears were gone. It was weird. So I sang again. I made it almost all the way through before reverting back into a sobbing ball of emotion with absolutely no chance of finishing. But I did. Finish that is. Again. I sang off another one of my best friends.

So funerals came and went and you'd think I'd get some peace for awhile. Alas, no rest for the weary. Two, maybe three years later I found myself sitting at the UPMC Presby ER waiting room for... two days? Yes, I think it was two days. That's how long it took for them to know that my aunt Nadine was going to survive the two consecutive strokes she'd suffered. Nadine -- aside from being my mother's best friend, the mother of MY dead best friend, and my godmother -- was the person I'd run to whenever me and Gram would fight, which was often. I'll tell you I spent a hell of a lot of nights there listening to her tell me why my grandmother was right without telling me my grandmother was right. She was my savior. She'd always stick up for me when Gram was being unreasonable. And I'd always secretly wished she was my mother instead of mine. But there she was with two blood clots in the back of her head. Good thing there were two, huh? The second one dislodged the first one and that's the only reason she survived. And I use the word "survive" loosely. She was blind in one eye, barely had any control of her limbs, and had the short-term memory of a gold fish. On top of that, her personality suffered drastically. Every time I see her my heart breaks because I can still only remember the aunt I loved so much.

Now if you really read everything up until now, you either have a deep interest in my life or you're REALLY in this to find out where the hell I'm taking this. For those of you who chose option A, thank you. You're ability at lying to yourself for my sake is phenomenal. For everyone else, I'm working on it.

Most of you reading this have no idea that these stories are a part of my life. I rarely talk about them because honestly, there's not a lot left to be said about it. I never wanted to dwell on any of it because most of the people involved in these stories are dead and gone. But if you know me, you have an idea of what my personality is like and a little of what makes me tick. But you didn't have to know these stories, did you? No, you didn't. My friends still know me as who I am now because of the things I've said and done. These dead people are gone; these scars I keep do not define me. They empower me.

There's not a day that goes by that I don't remember these events. All the people I've mentioned here have helped to shape me by their lives or their deaths. But not anyone else's, right? These people don't mean a damn thing to you, and yet it's almost as if you know them because you know me. We're defined by who we are, not by our parents and our relatives or our friends. We're judged; we're remembered by the choices we've made, not the ones they made. We're the sum of our experiences, not of our ancestors.

In these silly lives we're stuck living there are so many things we have no choice in. We don't choose our families. We don't pick the weather each day. None of us chose to go through the tragedies that every one of us has gone through. Those things are beyond us. But what we are in control of; what we can choose for ourselves is what we do with them. They're a weight we carry forever. We miss them. But our biggest choice is whether or not we're going to let those weights crush us, or are we going to use them as building blocks to step on; to use those experiences to make us stronger. That's our choice. That's our burden.

Nobody's going to remember the ones who died to make us who we are. Nobody's truly wondering what tragedies have forced us to mature, grow and overcome. They see the finished product and appreciate it for what it is. Our choice and our responsibility is what to show them. Will the world remember us as crushed, vanquished, overcome by the heavy burdens that fall on us, or will it remember us as that interesting drifter who carried it all in a handkerchief tied on a stick.

How we survive is what makes us who we are.

Hoody out.