What am I supposed to feel?

That ‘s the question that keep going through my mind. My wife IM’ed me today to give me an update on her father’s condition. He is known as Mr. C on this blog.

Regular readers know that Mr. C has been having a hell of a time with various cancers. He has had kidney, bladder, brain, and lung cancer diagnosed and treated over the past two years. The IM from my wife added bone cancer to the list. Mr. C is in a lot of pain. I don’t even want to speculate about what this means for the rest of his life.

To write that this situation is bad/awful/sucks and any number of other descriptions would just be redundant at this point. I can't know what it is like for Mr. C at this point. I have no way of putting myself in his place. I don’t really know what Mrs. K is going through. Hell, I’m still trying to figure out my reaction to my own father’s passing almost 12 years ago.

I don’t get the punch in the stomach feeling. I try to stay alert to what my wife needs and take what I can off of her shoulders, but there really isn’t much that helps. I look for opportunities to hug her, hold her, and listen without offering advice. But when it comes to feeling, it’s hard to describe. In a way, it’s almost like I don’t feel it.

I’m not going to figure it out by writing out this post and I’m not going to get into it any more since there are others who are feeling it terribly and need help with it. It’s just not time to be me oriented, but my lack of feeling does worry me and I’ll have to figure that one out once the current storm has passed.

Ten years of knowing Mr. C has not been nearly enough.