Razors and the Human Condition

So I had to let go of the far east fantasy story for the day. Only so much one can beat their head against the same wall. Instead, I took a break and watched my DVRed Battlestar Galactica Razor from earlier in the evening.

Holy Frackin’ Awesome!!! Today was like a hit of a drug, barely enough to satisfy and we won’t get another infusion until March. Still, it was a good hit.

Admiral Kane was my favorite Galactica Villain, and spending another two hours with her has only enhanced that opinion in my mind. I want to write as well as Galactica. It fills me with happiness to live in a world where such high quality SF exists.

There is a scene where Admiral Kane opens up her pocket knife, runs her finger over the edge, and says as explanation for her approach to warfare in the face of the complete destruction of everything she values, “. . . you are capable of setting aside your fear, setting aside your hesitation, and even your revulsion. Every natural inhibition that in battle can be the difference between life and death. Now you can be this for as long as you have to be. Then you’re a razor. This war is forcing us all to become razors, because if we don’t we don’t survive. And then we don’t have the luxury of becoming simply human again.”

I wonder in some ways if this is what’s been happening to me this past few months. Not that my life is war. Nor have I faced the complete destruction of my species. At the same time, I feel as though I have been fighting, and I have lost things of precious value.

My mother and I had an interesting discussion today about depression and grief. My grandmother died on October 6th, only a month after collapsing and then being diagnosed with Lung Cancer. My second day of orientation, my grandmother was hospitalized. Over the course of that month, I watched her fall away both physically and mentally a bit each day. Some days she was in so much pain, she was literally screaming. Her lungs collapsed twice. I can definitively say watching her go through that was one of the most–if not the most–horrible experiences of my life. I ask myself, would it have been better if she’d stayed home? She hated hospitals, and feared them. Eventually she was transferred to hospice, and died within a week of going there, unable even to speak except in gibberish.

I have spent the past month and a half doing my best to keep myself on task in the face of this, to keep myself mentally afloat, to keep from falling apart. This is in large part because I started Grad School, practically on the day she collapsed. This involved a series of new experiences, new skills to learn, new habits to form, all in the face of the grinding daily horror of her dying days. I’ve been holding myself togethe, but my mental reserves are not so strong. This is not something I acknowledge very often. A part of me wants to have the edge of a razor. Better that than having the mental consistency of pudding. But there is a price of living as a razor. Razors have edge, but they are quite brittle. Tap them at the wrong angle, and they will split in half.

I don’t really know what I’m saying. I think it’s just the thoughts are mixing in my head. The happy and the sad. They all form spiderweb like relationships to each other, carrying sensation like nerves.

There are no right answers, and no wrong ones.

Does that mean there aren’t any answers at all?

I hold my tears inside, and when I release them, I do it in the security of my own space. Even so, it slips out. Oozes through the cracks in my composure. Fills me with feelings of stress, urgency, like I don’t have enough time to accomplish all of the things I want to do. Or maybe that I lack the strength of will to follow through on the things I say are so important.

Is it a luxury to be human? Or is it a burden? Or is it both?