Comments on: insensitive

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 12:25:33 +0000

When my father suffered a paralytic stroke I said a lot of inappropriate things at the hospital. I arrived at the emergency ward after a hysterical telephone call from my mother and found my father laid out in the emergency room, his eyes wild with fear. The invincible hero of my youth looked old, frail and vulnerable. He feared he was dying. I took his hand and said, ‘papa, I’m here.’ He tried to speak but cried instead. He couldn’t swallow. I wiped the tears from his eyes and the drool from his cheek. We stood in silence and I held his hand.

He told me he had to pee. I went to the nurse explaining my father’s need. I returned to his side. A moment later the nurse came in with a bed pan, handed it to me and left. I looked at the bed pan and then at nurses’ station visible through the open curtain and then at my father. I said, “Dude, I love you and all but I’m not touching your dick.”

My father started laughing, convulsing so badly the nurses came running. I handed the bed pan to one of them and said, “He has to pee. I can’t. It’s a guy thing. I can’t do it.”

Humour got us through some troublesome times in the next six months of therapy and recovery. If you can’t mock the ones you love then maybe you don’t love them enough.

By: soubriquet

soubriquet — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:13:17 +0000

My dad was cracking jokes in his last few hours, it was his way to say the cancer might be killing him, but it had not won, it could not beat him, the person inside the body.

If ever I find myself in that place, let me be surrounded by irreverent friends, who make me smile, rather than dark goths, who yearn for the night.

By: Karen

Karen — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 09:59:58 +0000

And one of my favoritest ever quotes that's hung from fridge to fridge over last 8 years:

"You're only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it." (Robin Williams/ Reader's Digest Quotable Quotes)

By: Karen

Karen — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 09:57:43 +0000

My first big pain was losing my grandfather kind of suddenly when I was 14. Just a normal loss we all go through but we were very close. It sucked giant donkey nuggets.

I've always remembered my uncle, his youngest child, saying at the time, "If we don't laugh, we'll die."

By: Lesley

Lesley — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 08:33:04 +0000

"Hello, my name is Heather and I say insensitive ****. All the time. Some of you will think it's funny, some of you will not. That's a risk I'm perfectly comfortable taking."

And that's exactly why I love to read you. Thank you for being you. Always.