Feb 1

Day 2 of Recovery And Thoughts About Family Death

family issues

I woke up at 7am this morning, two hours earlier than I had set my iPod’s alarm clock to. I managed to consume a cup of potato salad, and a bowl of cereal with milk, with no problems of nausea of dizziness. I went to class, and got ambitious, so I consumed yellow rice with bistro chicken and honey-mustard chicken for lunch. Onset slight dizziness and headache by 3 o’clock, which was tolerable after a cigarette and lots of water.

I had sent an e-mail to work yesterday thanking them for their care of me when I tried to go into work on Sunday, and today I got a very warm reply that just made me all fuzzy and warm inside. I can’t wait to get back into work tomorrow.

Also got a phone call from mother today about one of my male cousins, who has been suffering from cancer for a few years. He passed away at one or two this afternoon, and my mom will be attending the funeral in Puerto Rico. I’ll have to admit that I never was too close to him (he was a first cousin, but was around 18 or 20 years my senior). My dad married late, so I actually have quite a few cousins whose children are my age. We’ve actually been expecting his passing to happen last year, so it was surprising that he lasted this long. His parents, my father’s oldest brother and his wife, were very close to me while growing up, and I would visit their house on weekends and play with their grandchildren, who were my age. And as a show of my own hispanic roots, theirs was the most mixed household of Chinese and Dominican cultures. They were my Tio and Tia (Aunt & Uncle), which made for great contrast when all the other children called them Abuelo and Abuela (Grandpa and Grandma). We haven’t really kept in touch after my father’s death, and with everything that has been going on with the family, it is really sad to see a family that used to get together at least once a month for dim sum, every year for at least two celebrations of Christmas/Chinese New Year, and every few years to visits to the ancestral village in southern China just break off into their own separate parts in just a few short years. The first crack may have started with the death of my paternal grandmother in 1996, and ever since then, there have been a rash of deaths in my family, including a distant cousin (from cancer), my paternal grandfather (from age), my second oldest uncle (from cancer), my father (from an aneurysm), a grandfather from a second branch, and now my first cousin. there’s a whole legend about a curse on the family, started when my father’s family moved the grave of my great grandmother (who had committed suicide earlier in the 20th century) to the ancestral burial ground in the early 1990s, which was forbidden to those who had died from suicide.

Eight years, 6 deaths. Kind of scary, don’t you think?