Same old grief

Dear Reader,

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain. _Khalil Gibran

Nine years later, you'll be going through some of your father's documents. Everything piled up neatly on a shelf by your mother, who now lives alone.

You will read everything; the last time he got promoted at work, his salary, his pension, etc.

And then you'll see a leaflet, the death certificate and flash back to the day you walked behind your mother to obtain this certificate.

You'll remember how the doctor wiped his sweat countless times and then scribbled some illegible words on the certificate template before handing it over to your mother.

Now, you will grab that document from your mother’s grasp, read it :

“Cause of death: gdjdhfdhh.”

Then you'll sigh in defeat. "What the hell did this doctor write?!"

In front of all these documents, you stare at that piece of paper again. Your head is clearer now. You grab your phone, strain your eyes, and type the illegible words into Google. And then—voilà.

Cause of death (now you can see it clearly).

You read the words over and over again and at that point, you'll have your Eureka moment.

That explains it...The unexplained weight loss, the pains in the lower part of the belly.

Ah, the stool. The passing of bloody stool. And then you'll remember one night, one of the many long, painful nights when the bloody stool refused to stop, and your mother ran to the neighbors.

The neighbors, without hesitation, grabbed the car keys and drove him to the hospital.

Your mother would later tell you how the bloody stool stopped when they got to the hospital. And how the nurses insisted that he needed to pass the bloody stool again before they could do anything.

You stare at this certificate again and wonder why all these hospitals never detected what was going on. I mean, one of them even suggested that it's spiritual attack and you should try traditional methods.

For nine years, you've always wondered why your father was so sick. Why there was no explanation for this thing that didn’t spare him. Why they cut him open several times without finding an answer.

In this moment, you will wonder why this last hospital didn't disclose his actual sickness to his family.

And before you put everything back in place, one silly thought will flash through your mind:

Would he have survived if it was stage 1?