Today is the three-year anniversary of my having taken my son to the emergency room because of sporadically-strange behavior. Within hours, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor, assumed to be malignant; he was admitted for further tests which confirmed a glioma blastoma. Thirty-one days later, he was dead.
I blame myself: why hadn’t I done more? Why hadn’t I foreseen this? Why did I fail to protect him? And sometimes I blame myself for taking him to the hospital; if I hadn’t, would he have had more time? Could he have found something positive in his death before succumbing, slipping into unconsciousness? Could there have been one last, wonderful, desperate thing in his life? I blame myself for not giving him something better than more than three weeks in an ICU unit and a few last dark days in hospice.
I blame myself.