This is all happening too fast for me...

I feel like I am caught in this crazy whirlwind of grief, and love, and confusion over what to do next, and action, and inaction. As many of my dearests know, my Dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in January of this year, and after a spring and an early summer of business as usual (my Dad has always been a very hard worker - he loves his job, with all of the responsibility, and dinner parties, and travel, and socializing), things began to quickly unravel just a few weeks ago.

He is currently in a tremendous amount of pain, unable to eat, the tumor has grown and he most likely has metastases to several different spots in his body. It rips out a woman's heart to see her father suffering this way - the part of me that is his child cannot believe what I see, and the part of me that is an adult, and especially a mother, wants to go crazy and wipe all the pain and suffering away with whatever I can.

My sisters are coming into town - Amy and Matthew are already here, and Julie, Tyler, Natalie and Noah are flying in tomorrow. I love them all so much, but I am afraid for what lies ahead for all of them. I feel the same way about my awesome extended family of uncles, aunts, and cousins. How will we all handle what is ahead?

Only in my smartest moments - which are few and far between as I rush around all day long, blinded and just moving - do I pray to God to help my Dad with his suffering, and do I talk to my Mom and hope she'll be right there waiting for him when it is time for something better.

First though, I wish we could just have a few more good days together. It has all gone so fast that basically Dad was working, and traveling, and having treatments, and enjoying his life - and I feel sad that I didn't get any of the good moments when they were there. I told myself at the time to let him go, to let him enjoy his life and doing what he loves to do...so I shouldn't be wishing that I had instead been a petulant child and gotten into a fight with him so that he would have slowed down and spent some time with me, instead. I wouldn't have wanted to be that kind of a person, and he wanted/needed to keep going.

I don't know what else to say...I'm so miserable right now.