It's really bad that the only time I update this is when I'm sad. Or something bad happens. Or I have an epiphany about something really depressing.
Well, everything else in life is going fine, and it seems that usually the only noteworthy things I have to mention are sad ones. So here it goes.
As you can see from my past entry, my Aunt Donna passed away on Wednesday night of cervical cancer. It may seem that I'm taking this better than I did my Uncle Mike, but to tell you the truth, I'm still numb. Because I go to school 12 hours away from home and am never in New Jersey, I never really get to see anyone anyways. So I still can't believe that Aunt Donna is gone. It's weird.
Aunt Donna was my favorite person that I called "aunt" in my family. She wasn't actually my aunt; she was my godfather's wife (where my godfather is my dad's best friend). She's seriously one of the funniest, most genuine people ever. She was a total Italian stereotype - real homebody, always cooking, didn't drive or do much of anything independent - my mom called her "the little 'mamadelle'", which is a term that hints at Italian women more from my great-grandma's generation than even just my grandma's. She made the best Italian food I've ever eaten. Actually, if you ever even hinted at coming home with me and I told you I'd make my aunts cook for you, she would be the first house I'd take you to. She was so funny and loved me and my sister like we were her own nieces. I would love going to her house because she'd always have something to eat, and she loved to talk and gossip.. so much fun.
So anyways, we found out about her cancer a few days after my uncle in February. My uncle took a more extreme root with his chemo and we're almost convinced that he shocked his body to death a month later; while Aunt Donna did the gradual route. I think she was doing pretty okay but kept slipping. I saw her right before I came back to school in August and it was after an extremely rough round of chemo and she was pretty knocked to shit. She actually apologized to me because she wasn't up and fun and entertaining - that's the kind of person she was.
Every time I talked to my mom between being back and school and this past week, it was a worse and worse update. On top of that, other family drama (within her family, regarding my godfather) worsened the situation. It sounded like a circus in Jersey.
I found out in mid-September that the doctors had told her family that her kidneys were shutting down, they were shipping her home and that she had 2 weeks. That was the first time I broke down about Aunt Donna. See, when my uncle died, he was okay.. okay.. okay.. and then I called my dad on a whim to see how things were going and he told me that Uncle Mike was going to pass on that day. So we played the Waiting Game for just a few hours. However, this 2 weeks notice elongated Aunt Donna's Waiting Game. I didn't want to answer my phone if it was my mom out of fear. Eventually, that 2 weeks was up and she seemed to be getting better, and they were sending her to Philly to a special hospital. I called my aunt 2 days before they transferred her and she sounded okay. I figured my mom would call me with good updates.
.. Not exactly. A few days later, on the morning of the 10th, I called my mom to check in and she told me that she was surprised that Aunt Donna had made it through the night, and that day was probably it. I was pretty sick to my stomach, playing that Waiting Game again.
I found out later that night through my sister's away message that she did indeed pass on at 6PM that night. My mom called me the next day to tell me the news, and while she sounded sad, it was not a surprise. So it goes.
Sorry that I wrote this whole long thing. I just wasn't very public about this one out of fear of getting emotional and annoying. It's just not fair that God's taken 2 of my family members in such a short period of time; one blood-related, the other one; might as well have been. I'm going to assume that since bad things happen in threes, and my other close-to-me great-aunt died a couple of years ago of stomach cancer, my family's done for awhile.
Here's to hoping.
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