We’re born, we live a miserable life, and we die of cancer.

Some of us fortunate ones actually have people show up at our funeral. They cry and they leave flowers and then someone or several someones get up behind the pulpit in some church that most of the attendees have never been to before and tell stories about the deceased.

Most times if the deceased was still alive they’d argue that the story didn’t really go that way.

But funerals are really for the living more than the dead.

So when a loved one dies and you can’t make the funeral for whatever reason don’t feel any guilt - even if your relatives demand it.

Because funerals are for the living to gather and make each other feel okay that a loved one is dead.

The dead don’t care.

This is coming from someone who had to go to therapy in the 5th grade when my grandpa died and I couldn’t deal.

Yeah, death, or any permanent loss of anything is foreign for a kid under the age of . . . like 25? I’m thirty and still trying to cope with my loss of a 21-year old liver.

Okay, granted, when my grandpa died I was also going through my second bout of childhood cancer. Maybe that had some effect on my undeveloped brain.

Fuck.

I still don’t want to talk about that shit.

To know me is to know that I don’t relate to most people in this world and I don’t pretend to either.

I am who I am, whether it’s “right” or “wrong” ‘cause personally I only see the world in grays and if you disagree with my philosophies then I am both willing to listen to your arguments and learn from them.

I am also bold enough to stand my ground and tell you to go fuck yourself - cause there are no “rules”.

I’m not perfect. I’m not better than anyone. I’m just trying to make the best of what life has dealt me.

But I won’t go into the darkness blindly.