Day 273 Surreal

Around 6 am this morning, I was bathing my fat baby and rejoicing that my shift was almost over and contemplating going to the gym on the on the way home. Closer to downtown at around the same time as I dressed my baby and charted my notes, my aunt passed away.

Technically, she wasn't a real aunt but a distant relative of my mom's, one of the rare women I called Tita in the US that was actually related to me. We actually hadn't seen each other in a while, and I don't remember speaking to her in any capacity since I was a teenager, if then. Even when she was diagnosed with brain cancer, I don't believe I said so much as a "I'm sorry to hear it" to her. She had gone into remission a little bit ago, only to relapse in the recent months, as the Baby had reported to me over time. I didn't think anything of it beyond, "Wow, I hope she gets better again," because I figured, if she could beat it once, she could do it again.

Even when her daughter sent us a text that she only had a few days left with us, some part of me hadn't acknowledged its truth, thinking that sooner or later, she'd recover even though I know that older patients on ventilators, sick patients on ventilators, don't have great chances of coming off them alive. So when I trekked up the stairs and my mother dutifully informed me that she had passed on, I didn't really know what to think. I mean, a part of me knew that she could die, that eventually she would die...just...not now. Not then. As the Baby bounced into my room and shared the wealth of her knowledge of the situation, she said, 


"It's so surreal," and I found myself completely understanding. 


The last death in our US, makeshift family was over ten years ago. It was my first year of middle school and the Baby cried at school randomly during that week. There were bad storms that week and walking to the prayer meetings meant wading through the flooded neighborhood but we did it anyway. I didn't wear black to the funeral and I stood off to the side when they lowered the casket and I listened to Zi give the eulogy. I held it together fairly well... until Zi's voice broke when he spoke of how proud he was to carry his father's name. I cried, and I remember the circle of people that stood by his grave even as my family drove away. 


It was surreal then to.