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June 23/25

So, a lot has happened since I last decided to write and a lot of it is not for the better. My life has turned upside down in the last several years in ways I never could have foreseen and I'm left trying to make sense of the senseless.

Chronologically is the only way I can even attempt to get through this so we start at the only logical place: the beginning.

Back in December of 2022 is when everything started, My childhood family dog Shaydee passed away. She was 14 years old and suffering and ultimately it was the right call. But I still miss her and little did I know her death would only be the beginning.

After the holidays going into January of 2023 my grandmother alerted us to the fact that she was diagnosed with cancer, sarcoma. This would be her 4th cancer diagnosis (previously she'd had breast cancer twice and cancerous tumors had later been found in the remnants of her kidneys) and she was also a long-term dialysis patient. There was nothing they could do to cure her, this diagnosis was terminal, but with chemo they could potentially give her more time. She opted for chemo treatments and we all hoped for a miracle that ultimately never came.

The chemo treatments were helping but due to the nature of chemo, a previously dormant infection in her blood came back. Without her immune system to fight it off it very quickly turned lethal and she ended up in the hospital. Once the infection was under control it was decided that she couldn't continue with the chemo treatments. Her body wasn't strong enough to fight off the infection completely, it would always be dormant and chemo would always bring it up to the surface. This infection had also left her very weak, too weak to be able to walk herself from point A to point B. It was decided that if she were ever discharged from the hospital, it would be so she could go home and die because she wouldn't be able to make the trip three times a week back and forth from the hospital for her dialysis.

It was decided after the infection was under control that she would set up a date through MAID (medical assistance in dying) and she would eventually come home. I cared for her for years and for this final week my mom moved in, sleeping on the couch, so she could care for her mother in her final days. My grandmother passed away March 4th 2023. I held her hand as she took her last breath. I will never be the same.

It was around this time that I lost a couple of people in my life, two dear friends that I never imagined my life without. One of whom was a dear friend of mine that I met at University. I've reached out since but she hasn't responded, I missed my chance when I disappeared again when my life started falling apart. I can't blame her. The other was a dear friend of mine who had been in my life since we were in daycare together. The last thing they said to me was that I should get a job so I could get an apartment after my grandmother passed. Not condolences, not words of comfort or love, but telling me something I already knew that wouldn't help me because no apartment here will let me have four shepherds. I have no reached back out, nor do I think I want to. But they were the last of my friends in the area and I have felt incredibly lonely ever since.

After my grandmother's passing came the realization that I was losing my home. I'd lost my job back in 2021, my EI had run out, and I hadn't found anything new. To be fair, I stopped looking after a while because of a trip I'd had planned for ages as well as my grandmother's deteriorating health. But because of this, I was very low on money with no means of paying for my own place (which I couldn't afford previously on my salaried, full time position) and now I'd inherited 3 senior dogs to care for in addition to my puppy. My grandmother's sister Muriel and only living sibling offered to let me move in with her, she had the space, and I took her up on the offer.

The six months that followed moving in with her would have been some of the worst months of my life if not for what happened after.

I was roped into my aunts businesses, making dog toys, managing the daycare dogs (by myself) in a small space where the dogs were not fixed, while managing her emails and social media presence, and giving her free art to use to advertise her services. During this time I was expected to keep my area of the house spotless, like it was unlived in, like it was show ready, which doesn't work when you have a senior dog in cognitive decline with incontinence. I did my best but it always still looked lived in which was an issue for her. She also hated that I locked my bedroom door to prevent her from barging in on me. Others tried to explain why (like my mother who remind my aunt when she was complaining about my door locking that I had just lost my grandmother, my home, and any and all sense of privacy that I had) but my aunt really didn't care.

To provide an example of what living with her was like, I was told 2 days after moving in that this wasn't going to work if I didn't have my whole life unpacked and organized to her satisfaction by the end of the week. I hadn't even finished moving out of my grandmother's home yet and she was telling me if I didn't jump when she told me to I would find myself homeless. Naturally, I prioritized. Everything that I couldn't store in my room and slowly unpack was unpacked in a rush while the other boxes were shoved into my closet so I could have some breathing room. My aunt would let herself into my bedroom whenever I wasn't at the house and take pictures of the mess that boxes caused. She would then send them via text to different people including my mom and her friends. I begged my mom to help me navigate her, pleaded because I was so scared I was going to lose my home again and this time I had so much more to lose, but for a while she wouldn't get involved. Her friend Jill actually jumped in and told both me and my aunt to deal with it like adults and stop dragging my mom into it but I was drowning trying to manage someone so manic who had to had everything her way. I had no power in this dynamic and nothing I did was ever enough. Furthermore, her moods changed on a whim, you could never guess what version of my aunt you'd be dealing with. When my mom finally started to listen to me begging for help, she still couldn't do much to help me, but she was at least an ear to listen.

It wouldn't last though. Six months after moving in with my aunt, roughly 7-8 weeks after threatening to evict me, she gave me the notice on my birthday that I would be getting an eviction notice. The next week on Thanksgiving I received the notice in a text. She gave me till the new year to move but she was going to make every moment I was still in the house a living hell. I was panicking. I still didn't have the money to afford my own place, the costs of housing had exploded during the pandemic and I still had 4 dogs to care for. No apartment would let me move in with 4 shepherds. I started making plans. I found myself a job, made arrangements with my mom to take the dogs, and I was going to either have to sleep in my car (which would have resulted in my death as we were getting into winter) or the offer came from an old high school teacher I'd gotten back in touch with a few years previously to crash on his couch while I figured out my next move. He lived close enough to my mom that I could drive over twice a day to feed and care for them around my work schedule.

In the end, my mom let me move back home. Most of my things went into storage (my mother's friends agreed to let me store things with them since there was no space at mom's) and I took what I needed. I moved in November. I slept on the couch for a few weeks while my brother made preparations to move, he'd found an apartment he could reasonably afford and was moving out beginning of December. The next couple of months went by okay, I fixed up my brother's old room (patched walls, scrubbed, dusted, painted) and moved in as best I could. We had dinner in March on the anniversary of my grandmother's passing, and I was starting to find footing. Maybe, I thought, 2024 would be okay.

It started with my dog Paynther, 11 at the time, getting sick. My grandmother had adopted her at 8 years old and we made the decision to not have her fixed. She'd previously been a breeder who had been retired. My grandmother and I didn't want to put her through a surgery that she didn't need. I wish we had because the infection Paynther had was pyometra, an infection of the uterus. Around this same time, my dog Marley, aged 12, had developed a nasty cough and we couldn't figure out the reason why. We thought it might be his hernia (located at the base of his trachea) which he'd had since he was at least 2 but anti-inflammatories had no effect. We thought maybe it was acid reflux but medications didn't help. We did bloodwork, ran tests, but nothing showed up as being wrong with him. On paper (and in behaviour) he was a happy, healthy boy except for that cough.

Paynther passed away first and I'm still devastated about it more than a year later. The decision to not have her fixed will haunt me for the rest of my life. I will never have another dog like her. The medications she'd been on for the infection hadn't done anything, she was too weak to fight it off, something exacerbated by the fact that she wasn't eating. I lost Paynther May 17th, 2024. Marley followed a month after on June 21st, 2024. He had started not eating and that morning after refusing his breakfast, he vomited blood and crashed. We rushed him to the vet and I said goodbye. Losing them hurt me in ways I can't quite articulate. They were as much mine as they were my grandmother's and their passing still brings me to tears.

While I was struggling with caring for my dogs, my mom started having some worrying health issues. Her eyes were getting worse, as though she was developing cataracts, she was smelling smoke when no one was smoking, and finally she had a massive migraine. My mom went to class Monday after giving birth that weekend. My mother fought through illness so her kids never saw her sick. My mom never once cried in front of us when we were growing up because she didn't want to worry us. My mom asked me on day 2 of her migraine to take her to the hospital. I let my TL know I'd be late clocking in and took her to the ER. I asked if she wanted me to stay with her and she said no, go home, go to work, take care of dogs. She'd let me know when to pick her up or she'd get my brother to. Here my mother was diagnosed with a brain bleed. Mom was discharged from the hospital after two weeks with some drugs and we celebrated her discharge by having a party. Mom was released on her 60th birthday so there was much to celebrate.

But it wasn't a brain bleed. Not entirely.

After countless MRIs and several months, we discovered that she had a brain tumor. A brain tumor that extended into both hemispheres of the brain. We didn't yet know if it was cancerous but it wouldn't change the treatment. All of this we learned on my 30th birthday. Two weeks later we got the official diagnosis: Butterfly Glioblastoma. My mom had brain cancer.

During this entire ordeal we received more awful news. My step-grandmother, a wonderful woman named Shan Mei who had been part of our family for more than a decade, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. After mom was diagnosed with a brain bleed, after her 60th birthday but before we discovered the tumor, we learned Shan Mei had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer which had already metastasized in her liver. Western medicine wouldn't save her life, only give her more time at best so she opted to go home to China and pursue TCM as a treatment. We bade her farewell and good luck, not realizing it would be the last time we ever saw her. The treatments, as I feared, did nothing to slow the spread of the cancer in her body and for a time she was stuck in China. We worried she wouldn't make it back to Canada and she was getting sicker and sicker with every passing day. Thankfully she made it home after a couple of months and while I wish I'd been able to see her, there were other things that needed to be taken care of to.

My grandfather, Shan Mei's husband, had taken ill and was briefly hospitalized. He recovered but not without damaging his and my relationship. Not that we got on well before then but I haven't been able to get over what he said to me. I had driven mom to the hospital for another MRI and while waiting for her I went to see my grandfather. We talked for a bit before asking about my dogs. He said mom and I had too many in the house - and, to be fair, he was right. But it's not like I had many options available to me at the time. When I told him there were fewer now because I had lost two of them he had the audacity to say to me I "neglected them to death" because we had so many. I fought so hard for them, did everything that was in my power, we never learned what was wrong with Marley and even now I still blame myself for Paynther's passing because of how preventable it was. I have not forgiven him.

After my mother's cancer diagnosis things seemed to happen both slowly and all at once. I started working more, hoarding banked hours for fear of the worst while Zach (my oldest little brother) took mom to her appointments. First it was a brain bleed with an unknown source. On my 30th birthday (in October) it became a brain tumor of unknown status. Two weeks later is became butterfly glioblastoma. My mom had brain cancer.

Let's rewind briefly to August. A show was announced in Toronto that I was excited to see. I talked to mom about it and she encouraged me to go. I hadn't had a vacation in a long time so I bought the show tickets but I held off on the flight and the hotel. Part of me wanted to go but the rest of me wasn't sure I'd be able to. Mom was getting sicker and sicker and I needed to be home if anything happened. But it was still just a brain bleed, she'd be okay. Eventually I bought the flight and booked the hotel. I was set to leave November 1st, 2024.

But I never got on the plane.

October 31st my mom got worse. It was my day off work so I slept in a bit before getting up and caring for the dogs. Mom was sat on the couch under her blanket which was the norm for her. There was no good morning so I figured she was asleep. I still hate myself for not clueing in sooner. While I slept mom had gotten worse. She was entirely non-verbal, unable to stand or even move her legs, and at some point in the night had relieved herself all over the couch. We called an ambulance and followed after her to the hospital. She stayed there for nearly the entire month of November. During her stay we were given the worst news imaginable: mom didn't have the necessary markers for chemotherapy, because of where the tumor was located surgery was out of the question, and it was determined that radiation wouldn't be effective at this point as the tumor had grown too much too quickly. My mom was going to die.

I was at the hospital every day for the entire length of the vacation I had booked and an additional week (which caused issues at work. I was penalized for taking vacation time without 2 weeks notice to be with my dying mom) but eventually I had to go back. I was no longer working overtime and banking hours, I was too tired to. Instead my life was waking up, caring for the dogs, work, then feeding and putting the dogs out before going to the hospital where I'd stay till 10pm. Then drive home, sleep and do it all again tomorrow. When a room opened up in the hospice center we moved mom (I didn't want to, I wanted her to come home, but ultimately it was the best choice) and then it became a nightly commute to the hospice center.

After mom had been moved to the hospice center we got more bad news. Shan Mei, who had been so sick she couldn't fly back home from China, had managed to come home but the treatment she'd sought overseas hadn't been effective. I didn't think it would be. I'd done some research on TCM as a treatment for pancreatic cancer and there was nothing that made me think we'd see any results. Still, it was a hard pill to swallow. She saw her oncologist at the hospital when she got home and was told there was nothing they could do for her. She had come home just to wait to die. Shan Mei decided she wasn't going out that way. She set up an appointment with MAID and then she was gone. There was no service for her, it was her wish there wasn't one, but it was hard not having a way to say goodbye. We made the decision not to tell mom this. The knowledge wouldn't give her any comfort or peace so mom never knew that Shan Mei had passed.

I watched my mom, slowly at first, then all at once as she deteriorated, as the tumor ravaged her mind. I read to her like she did to me when I was a child, I fed her, sat with her, talked to her, and when the time came I told her that if she needed to go, she could go. She didn't have to stick around if it was too much, I'd be okay. But she held on. We had picnics with her (even after she stopped eating), watched Hallmark Christmas movies with her, sang carols, shared stories, did our best to make the most of the time we had left.

My mom passed away in the early hours of the morning December 21st, 2024.

I don't remember much from that day but what I remember, I remember vividly. Zach came over to the house around 7am because my mom - which had been on Sleep mode - hadn't rung when he called. He told me then called Skylar (my other little brother) and I called mom's friends. From there it was a hectic morning of informing people, calling everyone we could think of. When mom's sister was told and posted it on Facebook we had to get a hold of her again and tell her to take it down because not everyone had been notified. It was a mess. We went down to the hospice center that same day to clear out her room - it was important to all of us that we clean it out as soon as possible so that someone else could benefit from the care mom had received. But it was hard. So was everything that followed afterward.

Planning mom's funeral was hard but at the end of the day, I think we put together a beautiful service. Mom had picked the music she wanted played, I sang, and we had an "open mic" of sorts where people could come up and share their stories. Muriel wasn't there and I'm glad she wasn't. She wasn't welcome anyway. My brothers had mentioned that our father wanted to come. He had wanted to come visit her while she was in hospice but didn't feel it appropriate. I agree, it wouldn't have been. Our father had done his best to make her life miserable before and following their separation 20 years ago. Anything he had to say to her at this point wouldn't have been for her benefit, but for his. He wouldn't have been welcome. I have been no contact with our father for more than 5 years now, I didn't want him there, but I wasn't going to deny my brothers having their only living parent there for support. I told them if they wanted him there, they could invite him. I don't regret it but I wish he hadn't come.

My father didn't come alone. He brought his sister Linda with him. I was doing a mic check before the service and as I walked out of the chapel I ran right into the two of them. I looked at my father, freaked, then hurried off without saying anything. I didn't want to speak to him. I didn't want to have to justify my decision to anyone. I didn't want to be made to console the man who had abused me. This didn't go over well with Linda and she let me know after the service. We had a reception afterward and Linda cornered me. She held me hostage for 30 minutes, using the time to try and guilt me into reconciling with my father. I'm no contact with my father for many reasons: emotional and mental abuse, his controlling and overbearing nature, his political beliefs, his refusal to accept me as the queer woman I am, his insistence that queer people shouldn't exist. I don't care what her intentions were, he hadn't done anything to prove to me that he's working on himself. I'm not interested in reconciling. Nor am I interested in being cornered and held hostage at the reception of my mom's funeral as I'm told I have to reconcile with the man who abused me for so much of my life. When we, myself, my brothers, and my mom's friends, got home I told them what happened with Linda. Neither of my brothers saw anything wrong with what she did.

Things have been moving at a strange pace since the funeral, both too slow and too fast. I'm trying to buy the house but in February I was told at work that my contract was being pulled and we were given no information on what was happening till the last day of our contract. I got shifted to a new one right after the last of my senior dogs died. I lost Puck at the end of February to a mix of old age (14 1/2) and a pancreatitis flare up. My new contract sucked the life and soul out of me and there was nothing I could do because no one else was hiring around the same pay rate. I'm not making much but I am making enough to keep the house running, any decrease in pay and I lose that. I joined the local choir and we had our first performance in May but that was also the first show I'd ever done without mom. I sobbed after each show. Mom's 61st birthday was this past June and I don't know how I got through it. It just seems so unfair. And now, I'm finding out yet again that I may be losing my job.

I don't know how I'm managing to put one foot in front of the other, only that I must because I have no choice. But I can't keep going like this.