Wednesday 27 February 2013

Why I've been MIA for a bit....

... Okay. I know it's been more than 6 months. I have very good reasons though.

  My Grandma died.

  There's no nicer way to put it. You can say she pushed the daisies, kicked the bucket, went to a better place, entered the light, or any other way that you can imagine, but the simple truth is, she's gone.

  I know this is an Art blog, and I strive to keep it that, not a diary, but a place where artists and art lovers can view and enjoy good quality Art. Personal things go in my own diary. But I have reasons for writing this. It's a way of letting you know that I still care for this blog, but I had more important matters to tend to.

  I lost my grandmother to cancer. I want people whose family members have the sort of cancer my grandmother had to be informed. I want my grandmother's journey with cancer to be known.


  My Grandma had cancer of the ovaries more than a decade ago. They gave her radiotherapy to shrink it, then took her ovaries out. The cancer went away, but it also took away the chance of her having another child. My mum was her only child, as am I the only child to my mother.

  Approximately 8 years later, the cancer relapsed with her getting liver cancer. I remembered it hazily. I was just a kid then. My relatives never got on quite well, so with the hospital trying to rush her for surgery, and my mother being stressed out by the whole incident, I guess no one bothered to tell the kid (me) what was going on. I didn't know she had cancer. I didn't know she ever had cancer before.

  I remember her being wheeled into the operating theater. The only connections I could make in my little kiddy brain was that to movies whereby the patient would be wheeled into the operating theater, being really sick and all. In the next scene, a doctor would come out of the operating theater and tell the family that the patient had passed on. I wondered then, if my grandmother was sick enough to die on the operating table.

  She looked really yellow. Through research online, I found out that eating too much papaya could do that to you. So could cancer of the liver. The nurse wheeled her in, and there I was staring at my grandmother, almost too short to see her without standing on my tip-toes. I cried. I thought she was going to die...