xanderphoto

So.
I've not been around lately. I have gone out and done nothing.

My grandmother is dying, and it's a slow painful death of cancer. The reason I have gone out and done virtually nothing? Grandma has lost the use of her legs, they are dead weightand there isn't a damned thing we can do about it. There are only two people that can lift her, myself and my uncle. So that means that Tony and I are trading off staying there, Tony during the day, I stay there at night. It is the single most painful experience of my life to see my grandmother this way. My grandmother was the one that said "why just crayons" and gave me acrylics and a canvas at five years old, it was my grandmother that gave me my first gallery showing that same year and literally introduced me to Andy Warhol. It was grandma that took care of me when I had the chicken pox, while mom was at work, and now? Now I'm lifting her two hundred pound frame to the toilet beside her bed. The insomnia I've suffered for the last few months has been sort of useful in that regard, because I'm not woken up in the middle of the night, I'm already there. It does however, unnerve me, see I can't just go check on her everytime she screams, because it's so often, and also because she actually does so in her sleep, and it really bothers me that I'm staying stone faced over all of this partially because she needs to see someone that doesn't look sad all the time, but partially because for some reason I can't.

I'm not by nature a religious man, It's not that I don't have faith, I just have a hard time believing the word of man = the word of God. What I'm saying, is generally I don't pray. If anyone still reads me, and anyone does still pray, keep her, and maybe even me in them...