A Family Call

CONTENT WARNING: Death in the family, suicidal thoughts, sorrow.
This story is Dark.
It is totally okay to skip this if you're not in the mood for that.

Yeah. This story needed a content warning more than most. In the writing group where I presented it, a new member said "Ok, I had heard that some of you folks go dark, but I had no idea you went THIS dark."
And he's right. This story is rough. And I'm sorry. But it was honestly rather cathartic for me to write. I've not thought about it in a while, but let me get the whole story out.

The first opening paragraphs I actually wrote waay back in elementary school. I was like, 13. Yeah, I guess I was a messed up kid. BUT, that was only the first paragraphs, only the dad going to the hospital, nothing else. Back then it was merely a flash, a vision, an interesting use of language.
Then I buried it and forgot about this story for a decade.

Around my high-school into early university, my extended family had a series of moving people into nursery homes, two because of age and one because of cancer. 3 of my grandparents, and one aunt, all in the span of 5 years or so, moved to a nursery home, lived there for a while, and then died.

I distinctly remember writing the funeral section of this peace with a vivid memory of an actual funeral.

I, somehow, during all this re-dug those first couple paragraphs out from my memory and found them on an old backup (back up your stuff!) and rewrote it entirely because it was bad (I was 13) and it was in Danish. So I dug it up, fleshed out the characters, and wrote it out.
It is only until recently I made the connection that I wrote this story during all that family sorrow. It didn't even occur to me then that this was the obvious connection between them. I just had to write something out, something that was worse. It helped me process it, I guess.

And I honestly like this story. It's dark as hell, but when I'm in for that, it is a cool exercise in a different style of writing, of evoking rather than explaining, of flashes of images rather than full scenes.