"Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant"

I just finished this book by Roz Chast called "Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant". It's about your parents dying. The whole traumatizing process of seeing your loved ones pass away. It's Complicated. Having to spend so much money on palliative care, nursing homes, hospitals, nurses, supplies, medications. So much emotional energy spent on them and non for yourself, you start to resent them. Feeling ashamed and guilty of your feelings of resentment. 

What if your relationship with your parents wasn't great? What if there was abuse and trauma involved? Then it's even more confusing. How to take care of them and treat them. And the surreal experience of emptying out their apartments to move to a nursing home knowing that this is the beginning of the end. Looking through their college diaries and the small things they hoarded makes you realize they were once self sufficient humans, they were kids, teens, anxiety riddled college students and adults that “didn't know any better”. But can you forgive them for all the trauma they put you through? All the mean things they said to the person they were supposedly taking care of, a child. What use is there to resent someone that is actively dying? They can't do anything for themselves anymore. They become adult sized infants. 

This book is a bit existential. We will all become that one day. We will all die and thus go through that same process of dying. It's a horrifying process. I definitely don't wanna go through that. Why can't we die in peace and just drift off into the abyss in our sleep. But we can't choose how we die. Some die of diseases, some die in accidents or crime, some die of old age (aka your body actively giving up on you). Most dying "options" suck. And again it's something we can't control.  No matter how much you exercise and eat organic healthy foods, you can not guarantee a "good" death. 

So what can we control? The life we live in the present. The people you surround yourself with. The food you eat. The activities you partake in. So make sure you do whatever makes you happy. Don't worry about what others think cause we will all die anyway. So go on that trip, ask that person out, have your fav food and listen to your fav music. Fill your life with good things and help others fill their life with good things too. Might as well, right? Cause life is so absurd it makes no sense at all. This reminds me of "The Stranger" by Albert Camus. Let's accept that life has no meaning. We don't have to go through the hassle of giving life meaning and we can rejoice in what life has to offer. Or give it meaning. I mean it is your life after all.