“I hope this happens to you” — And Other Awful Thoughts I Don’t Mean

“I hope this happens to you,” I think.

Of course, I don’t mean it. Not really.

But my God, for a split second, I’m so filled with rage that I do.

When you think about what grief looks like, you have a picture already in your head. It’s a person in all-black clothes, looking sombre and quiet and hollow. Sometimes, they’re wailing with a veil over their face at a cemetery with lush green grass, grey skies and greyer tombstones. And that’s fine. For a lot of people, that’s what grief looks like.

My father and I on my 28th birthday in 2022.

I’ve been grieving my father since July 2023.

Mind you, as of writing this, he’s still technically alive. It’s 5 AM as I edit this (I’ve been writing this, whatever this is, on and off for weeks) and I’m the one on the night shift watching him have what I think are his death rattles in bed and it’s my older sister’s birthday today. He’s in a vegetative state and requires 24/7 care and we’re just waiting for him to pass. But sure, he’s still technically alive.

But the father I knew was gone long before he slipped into this vegetative state last week.

My father first had his seizure on the 17th of July 2023. Before that, we had no idea that anything was wrong, especially him.

His team of doctors first thought that it was a tuberculoma mass in his brain and assured him that it was absolutely not cancer. I remember his doctor saying that so distinctly — it absolutely wasn’t cancer. The machine was 96% sure it was a tuberculoma, after all. No, they couldn’t be 100% sure without a biopsy but since my father displayed no symptoms, apparently, of anything else and how I had primary complex as a child over 20 years ago, the doctors were fairly confident that it was just a tuberculoma. After a year of tuberculosis medication, he’d be fine. He’d need another scan in a month or so to observe how the mass was taking to the tuberculosis meds but otherwise, he was given the all-clear. He was even able to go back to work after about a week.

Dad was a fighter, one of his doctors said.

He even asked when he’d be able to go bowling again and his doctors said soon, sure. He’d be able to go bowling again, no problem.

He’d be fine.

He was going to be fine.

We’d all be fine.

We had to take him to the hospital again in September 2023 where we would then have to wait in the expensive private hospital for three days because my father’s health insurance had already maxed out at this point and he couldn’t get his surgery there. He’d had to quit his job just the month before because of this illness. After waiting to be transferred to the public hospital (which we were unable to do because the public hospital was so unbelievably full), he was transferred to a less expensive (but still expensive) private hospital where he could have a craniotomy to remove the mass, which was now definitively not a tuberculoma, but doctors believed was some form of brain cancer.

My older brother, a radiographer, put it to me gently when he was telling me and my older sister that dad’s brain cancer was either the bad kind or the really bad kind.

Reader, it was the really bad kind.

So much for 96% certainty, huh?

Stage 4 Glioblastoma Multiforme is considered one of the most fatal, lethal, and aggressive forms of cancer, according to all the medical articles and testimonies I’ve read and watched online. And, of course, his doctors. The prognosis is never good, especially since my father is already 64 years old. Now, I’m not a medical person unlike both my siblings so if you want to know the facts, go Google it. I know I did.

I’m a writer so all I can tell you is what I saw.

My father, smiling, and holding up a scratch off lottery ticket that I bought him that won him five quid.

Over the next few months, I watched my father shrink.

My whole life, my father was a towering presence over me. I’m the youngest child my parents have — my brother, 11 years older than me; my sister, 6 years older than me. I reason that this is why, at a few months shy of 30 years old, my whole family still see me as the littlest girl. And my entire life, my father was the strongest person in my life up until he wasn’t.

He bowled passionately for longer than I’ve been alive, I think, with custom gear and bowling balls and shoes so I’d always tease that his right arm was jacked as hell meanwhile his left was left lacking. He could lift the heavy water cooler jug like it was just a couple of grapes, easy and smooth. My father always showed up dignified and presentable with nice, expensive shoes, a spritz of his favourite Hugo Boss perfume, and a good, pressed shirt. My father is a Taurus Sun, Libra Moon — the man went to the salon to have his hair done and got regular mani-pedis more than I did, and I’m extremely fussy.

My father was also stubborn and extremely argumentative — we disagreed about literally everything — but he was well-spoken and his profession relied on him being able to lead in the modern corporate world. He loved getting a rise out of me and randomly quizzed me about random facts and pop culture knowledge, and I would always, always take the bait. He encouraged my curiosity and my intellect, even when it veered him and me away from each other on just about every subject matter known to man. It certainly made car rides and dinners interesting when my dad wanted a debate.

And in these worst months — these last few months, his last months of life — I watched my father turn into something else entirely. The aphasia slowly stole his ability to speak — first, it just made his speech all garbled and jumbled. Then, he could only say one syllable over and over again until we could kind of figure out what he wanted to say by like… 20 minutes of charades. Until he turned quiet and simply did as he was told to do. Until he couldn’t say anything at all.

His entire right side was all but paralysed pretty much from the beginning. At first, he couldn’t get up to go to the bathroom without someone holding him up. Then, he couldn’t get to the bathroom at all without first being transferred to a wheelchair. Then, he couldn’t sit himself up to get to the wheelchair at all.

Then, he stopped waking up.

He’s been asleep for a week now, as of writing this.

He’ll never go bowling again.

My father is still alive, as of writing this, but the father I knew is long gone. I think I’ve been grieving him since July.

And when you picture grief, it doesn’t look like me. Because while I’m sad, I’m devastated, and I cry just about any time I remember what’s happening to my father, I’m not sombre and forlorn and quiet.

I’m angry. I’m loud. I’m really, really beyond out of my mind with rage.

Let me tell you what that kind of anger is like.

“It’s easier to be angry than to feel the pain underneath it.”
— Jennette McCurdy, “I’m Glad My Mom Died”

One of the “stages” of grief is anger.

Everybody who knows anything about grief already knows that. But I guess I never really understood what that kind of anger looked like until now. How could loss make you so mad? Because I’ve been angry in my life before, sure. Irritated, frustrated, annoyed… all of that, of course. I’m not the world’s most patient person, even before all this began, I know how I get. So I’m well acquainted with the emotion. But this is different.

How can grief make you so angry, make you this angry, all the time?

At first, I was angry with the doctors who were so sure that it wasn’t cancer. I remember the smug smile of my father’s first neurologist when he told us he was positive that it probably wasn’t cancer. Because when we found out that it wasn’t, I’d had all this hope that our lives could maybe return to normal, and I wanted to throttle that first doctor. How dare you say it would be fine when it isn’t?

Then, I was angry at how much this was costing my whole family — like literally, financially. My father didn’t ask to get sick or do anything to get this disease. It was sheer bad luck. So all the costs that come with these medical bills, I’m angry that we have to deal with it at all. My parents depleted all of their decades’ worth of savings to pay for his medical bills. My siblings and I are working as hard as we can to try and keep up with the needs as they come. This wasn’t anyone’s fault but we’re paying for it like it is, and I’m so angry that this is how the world works.

I’m angry because when we didn’t know what was wrong with my dad, people were so supportive. They would send food to the family and check in on how you’re doing. And just when it gets to the absolute worst part it could get, suddenly it just stops. That support, that warmth, that kindness, that understanding — it just goes away. Like those things left when the hope that he could get better did.

Suddenly, you’re talking too much about your father’s cancer and you get ignored and unheard until you stop talking about it. People view your stories and skip over them because they know — your dad is dying and you’re sad, skip to the next meme. We get it.

They’ll flood your notifications with comments or messages of “condolences” when he passes and move on as if your entire world and your whole life weren’t decimated in the span of a few months and it feels like nobody cares. A few of them will ask you ‘How are you?’ and I’ll answer honestly because I always answer honestly, they’ll say ‘I’m sorry’, and we’ll linger in awkward silence because there’s nothing else to say until I allow the subject to change and we change the subject.

That makes me angry.

I’m angry because I’m only 29 years old and I’ve been watching my father slowly, painfully die for months every single day, losing parts of himself, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Right now, I’m watching him in real time decay from the inside out, breathing his last breaths, and there’s nothing I can do to make it better, there’s nothing I can do to help, and losing your father like this just hurts but I’m expected to carry on with my job like everything is normal and act like everyone else’s problems are just as bad as this. No, it’s not a suffering competition but come on, y’know?

And sometimes, it’s like people pick fights with me, knowing what I’m going through, and it fills me with the worst kind of wrath I’ve ever felt and I want to say things I wouldn’t say. I think things I wouldn’t normally think. My entire life is on fire and I’ve never made these sounds before, how could you expect me to be soft right now?

Oh, you don’t want to deal with payday traffic? Oh, you’re gonna be too tired to enjoy the weekend? Boo fucking hoo, my father is dying in one of the worst possible ways imaginable right in front of me and I have to pretend like everything is normal and deal with the rest of my life like this isn’t happening to me and my family.

How dare you complain in my presence?

How dare you take that fucking tone with me?

I know it’s not rational. I know it’s not kind. I know I’ve been unintentionally triggered.

And yet, I’m filled with blind, suffocating rage anyway.

And that’s when I think it — this thought. This evil, evil thought.

There’s a reason that anger is often depicted with fire. That’s what it feels like — like you’re ready to combust at any moment, like your blood is boiling with heat.

And what else is fire supposed to do but burn?

“I hope this happens to you.”

The thought comes to me at the height of my rage and part of me is taken aback that I could even be capable of thinking that. That I could be capable of thinking such thoughts. I’ve tried my entire life to be a good person. (This is not to say that I am, I don’t know if I am. I hope I am.) It doesn’t come naturally to me, admittedly, but I try to be good and do good and say good things. I want to be a good, decent person.

A good, decent person would never wish this upon their worst enemy, right?

“I would never wish this upon my worst enemy” is something people say when they’re forced with this kind of unimaginable loss, just to depict that this is absolutely one of the worst circumstances a person could ever go through. It means that this situation is worse than any torture that they could imagine that they could dish out.

And it’s true, for the most part, most of you could never wish this pain on anyone in any way.

In reality, that remains true. God, I would never really wish this to happen to anyone.

But there is a part of me — the small, dark, angry part of me that is capable of thinking the vilest, cruellest, most evil of thoughts. And I admit it. It brought me great, deep shame to have had this thought. Of course, I don’t mean it. I can’t reiterate that enough. I don’t mean it. I don’t. It’s a vile, malicious, awful, horrid thought and I don’t mean it. I don’t mean it. I swear I really, really don’t.

But by God, for a split second, I have to admit I do. I do mean it.

It’s just a split second. It’s just part of me. And I’m sorry to have thought it.

I’m just angry. And anger makes you cruel. It makes you hard, sharp, and unreasonable. It’s a dirty, poisonous fire that consumes every part of you and everything that comes near the air you breathe

And I’m so angry that for a split second, I’m capable of thinking the most horrid, awful things that I know I don’t mean and that I would never say if I was rational and okay. Okay people don’t wish hurtful things upon others, let alone this. This is some kind of hell. And I don’t think that angry people are okay people. I think having this kind of wrath should be the first sign, really — that you’re not okay.

But what am I supposed to do, just not be angry anymore?

I wish we wouldn’t tell angry people to just not be angry anymore.

Would you tell a person who just got stabbed to just stop bleeding?

If you think this could never be you, I’m glad. I hope that it stays true. If you think you are kind and patient and understanding and good, and you would never harbour these thoughts under any circumstances, you don’t know. You just don’t. Even the best of people have a shadow and for a split second, the darkness comes in. It wears anger like a cloak and it spreads, cancer-quick, all over your body.

My mother doesn’t like it when I admit that I have these thoughts. The one time I kind of slipped up and said as much, she was immediately distraught. I was half convinced she was going to make me pray a few hundred thousand Hail Marys and beg for forgiveness from God, out loud, in front of her for even admitting that I had the thought. I think she almost did.

But if you want technicalities, even Christ looked up at God and asked why He had forsaken Him, if you want to go that route with me.

Anyway, we go back to the thought.

And to be clear, it was just that — a thought. It was just a thought.

I’ve never said that to anyone and you may quote me on that. I’m not the kind of angry where I punch holes into the drywall and I just yell abuse all the time. I do have some control over this rage.

I’m the kind of angry that grits her teeth and swallows down the fire instead of breathing it out… usually. Though at the height of my rage, I may bark with particularly sharp irritation or theoretically angrily bawl my eyes out on the floor of my boss’ private bathroom for 15 minutes, ending my theoretical crying session just 2 minutes before a meeting. Possibly. Maybe. I will neither confirm nor deny that theory.

I just know that I haven’t been pleasant to be around, even when you know what’s going on. I’m aware.

If you were me, would you be?

I think that’s all I want, really.

Maybe I just wish that they knew what this was like—they being the people who think that this angry, grieving me is all I am and will ever be. I’m still actively grieving. My father is still just dying, not dead. How can I move on?

Maybe if they knew what this kind of pain was like — how isolating it is, how terrifying it is, how horrifying it is to live through — and someone treats them the way they’ve treated me, would they stay calm and kind and patient and quiet and understanding and good? And I wish I could be treated with some kind of compassion, some kind of mercy, some kind of cooling, calming water instead of having to figure out how to put the fire out by yourself while the house is already on fire.

Or maybe I’m just not grieving correctly then, right? Nobody ever told me what the “basic social etiquette” for this situation is. Ha.

Who knows.

So, what’s the point of writing this?

I don’t quite know either. I don’t think there is a point. But I’m writing it anyway because writing is all I know how to really do. Who am I writing this for, I couldn’t say.

Maybe it’s to you, who’s reading it and going through it too. Who’s googled this kind of cancer and wanted to know the stories of everyone who has gone through the same thing you’re going through and maybe you just want to know that it’s okay that these dark, awful, terrible, shameful thoughts have entered your mind at the height of your worst emotions. I know I did that. And I just want to say that you’re not your worst thoughts. You’re not alone and I’m sorry that you’ve known this darkness too. I’m sorry.

Maybe it’s to you, who wants to know how I’m doing. Maybe you’re a friend or maybe you’re just nosy. That’s okay. Or maybe not me specifically, but someone you know is also in this hellish life experience. And the person you know is darker than you remember. Less kind, more irritable, angrier than you remember them being and you want to cut them off in the interest of self-care, to which you are more than entitled. You are allowed. Please don’t feel bad for taking care of yourself. That’s okay.

But I just beg of you to remember this. This person who you met in the light of their life has never known this kind of darkness before. It is unfamiliar. It is torturously slow. And, like all things, it will pass. And I beg you to please, extend this person some modicum of grace, of patience, of compassion. The way I am begging those in my life to please not judge me too harshly for how I am, right now, in the darkest portion of my life. You know this isn’t me.

I hope this never happens to you. But if it does, I hope you remember.

And maybe this is to you. Maybe I do hope this happens to you.

And if it does, I hope you meet yourself.

See how you take it.