I was/still am emotionally stunted in some regards. My childhood, whilst not as horrible as some, held its fair share of neglect, mental illness, alcholism, drug addiction, and religion to a rather psychotic degree.
As a teenager, I didn't really think it affected me that much; as an adult looking back, I'd say that a lot of the issues I faced and dealt with throughout the years could've been handled a lot better if I was allowed the emotional capacity and social awareness most receive and learn during their younger years.
During the past 7 or 8 years, spent mostly in my own self-imposed isolation, cut off from the real world and living in one of my own creation, living my own selfish existence and ignoring the wants and needs of the very few people I had around me during that time, I have reflected a lot on the past and it took me a long time to return to the present.
The present I have emerged in is filled with both love and sorrow.
My partner's father died this morning. From lung cancer.
I don't have much of a relationship with death and struggle to react appropriately. If there even is an 'appropriate' way to react. My own father died at the very end of 1999; on Christmas Day in Kings Cross, Sydney, of a drug overdose. I felt nothing. There was no grief, just an attitude of, "Whatever. This really doesn't affect me. I don't care." -- an attitude that lasted til I was around 26 years old when the only item I had of his, a glass fruit bowl, was fumbled then shattered on the kitchen floor, releasing 15 years of repressed emotion.
Today I find myself crying hysterically, not from the loss of a life I've known for 17 years but from a severe bout of empathy. I keep putting myself in the shoes of my partner's dad's missus. Lying beside him on his deathbed, suddenly realising that he had passed, and how she must've felt and reacted, and it kills me.
That scenario keeps flashing into my mind, as vivid as life itself.
And one day either myself or my partner will be in that exact position.
Today is the first day I have ever thought that far in the future and reflected on our mortality and how our lives and deaths affect others.
It's bleak.
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