Death is for the living

I made a final decision today and I must stick to it. Why is letting go so hard to do? I always said I was done, but would be weak and go back. Knowing very well that it was wrong and I would be hurting myself again. The hardest part is the finality of it all. Now I'm faced with the unknown. Unlike most people I hate surprises. I love the fact that the next 50 years of my life has an outline to follow. I know the end result, or so I think I do... but then how can we ever really plan for tomorrow? I may not live to see the next 50 years, hell I may not live to see the end of this month. Losing people that you love the most will do that to you. Especially when you're not ready for them to go.
I lost all of my grandparents by the age of 7. Three of them in the same year. I know that's why I love being around everyone's grandparents or elderly people in general. This year I even lost a man that I adopted as my grandfather. Unfortunately after losing so many people in my life I grew numb. I knew all too well what the sound in my mother's voice meant when I answered the phone. I don't think I ever really cried over it.
Growing up was, to say the least, not easy with many things that will go unmentioned. I confided in my mother's best friend Carol, only I called her Mom. She never had any children and always told me that I was the daughter she always wanted. I knew that even though she was not my biological mom she was my mother and always would be. In her eyes I could never do wrong, no matter all my screw ups, she still loved me. When I was 18, my real mother told me Carol had died in an accident. I just saw her a week before when she came to see my confirmation at St. Philip's. I couldn't understand, I didn't want to believe it. So I pretended that she was still alive and well in San Diego. I couldn't let go. I would still write her letters, but put them in the trash instead of the mailbox. Her picture is right next to my bed and even now it's too hard to look at for too long. Honestly, I still haven't admitted out loud that she is dead.
Only the pain of loosing her was quickly replaced with loosing a man that I loved. We even bought a house together and he told me, for the moment, the house was my ring. And to me, it was the most beautiful ring I had ever seen. When I was 21, I learned all too quickly that life is never guaranteed. I was told over the phone that he was "no longer with us" by an OSI agent with the Air Force. I had missunderstood and thought the man was telling me that he had left the military. And then I hit the floor. I'll never forget that memory. That kind of loss changes you. I barely even spoke for the first month, and once I did it wasn't me anymore. I became numb to the world, my friends, and my family. And I couldn't let him go. If I did he would be gone forever.
Three years pass and my life was slowly coming together. I graduated from the U of A and I was preparing to go to law school. On the way to work one morning I saw that I had a missed call from my Daddy. Having not spoken with him in a while, I called him without listening to the message. I talked to him with excitement and asked him how he was doing. "You didn't listen to the message?" " No Daddy what's wrong?" He hesitated to say it and then the words came out, "Tanya is dead. Car accident." That's all I heard. My oldest sister, dead. Gone. What I would give to go back 5 minutes before that phone call. I was shaking so bad I could barely drive my car. Another memory permantently etched into my mind. This time I treated the death differently. After the first day of knowing I couldn't cry anymore. I made a decision my life was going to change. Life really is too short. I was so unhappy with everything and decided to only do the things that make me happy.
It took about a full year to make the complete change. With the catalyst being the loss of my Uncle twp years prior. Again I didn't want to believe that he was gone. I had to do a lot of soul searching and realized I never grieved his loss. My Dad is a pilot and was never really a big part of my life, he was always overseas. My Uncle Bob was there for all the hollidays, birthdays and all the Uof A basketball games in between. He always made me laugh with the dirtiest jokes. Most of them I never understood until I was older, but they sounded bad. And hearing my mom yell, " Oh Bobby!" let me know a child should not hear such things. And I loved him for that. He never treated me like a child. When he was diagnosed with Cancer a few weeks before Thanksgiving I knew he was going to die. My biggest problem was the Cancer was fast and four months later he had passed away. I had never prepared for it to happen so quickly and never had a chance to say goodbye. Goodbye... I hate that word. My mother has been batteling Breast Cancer since I was a little girl. When I was 5 my mother came home drunk and kneeled down in front of me. She told me that she may not get the chance to see me grow up. I never got over that I don't think. I thank God everyday, that at the age of 26, despite all the scares she is still a survivor and still in my life. Deep down I was hoping the same would happen with my Uncle Bob. That by some miracle his tumor would dissapear and everything would go back to the way it was.
All of these things have taught me so much about life. Wanting things to be the way they were will only bring you down. The beauty of life is that it changes and you must change with it. Expectations are pointless and wanting superficial things to make you feel better is just plain ignorance. The one person that should love you the most, is yourself. We are the only ones that can make ourselves happy. And only we can make changes needed in our lives in order to be happy. And that is why I'm writing this. I have changed my life already. The ocean is litterally my back yard, I'm modeling full time and I play poker professionally. And even then I'm not truly happy. That is why I must let go, as hard as it is to do, it's the only way. So today, March 28th, 2006, I finally let go of ALL the things that hold me back. It's time to open the door that stands before me and walk though it. All the baggage will be left behind. This step is going to be difficult. It's not going to be easy. However, I must do this to move on, or I'll never truly be happy.