THE PROPHETS OF DOOM

In the winter of 1988-89, I went to Colorado to visit my friends. The morning I boarded my plane, the word came down that they were disbanding our team, it seemed they were moving to a purer medical model to continue soaking insurance providers...I mean to provide a higher quality of patient care. No, wait...I meant that first thing I said.
I was going to Colorado to visit my friends, but the truth was, I needed to get away from the woman I was living with and everything that went along with our cohabitation.
Her paternal grandparents had come for a visit, and on the day they left they informed her that her father had prostate cancer...in fact, he'd had it for over a year, had opted out of conventional chemotherapy and the alternatives he'd chosen didn't work. He was dying.
Talk about door knobbing! Grandma suggested my girlfriend "take a nap" and she would feel better...thanks Grams!
She didn't feel better. I tried to be supportive, but for some odd reason I depersonalized his cancer and distanced myself. I didn't want to...I couldn't help myself. I got angry instead ( there's that anger thing again ). A month or so later, my mom called me. She had news...bad news. She had been diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus.
I cried and wailed to the gods. I started to drink heavily. I started smoking weed again with renewed vim and vigor. This was a lose-lose strategy...so I opted for the failsafe plan: I just got angry and stayed that way.
I decided a trip to Colorado was in order, to get back to a place where I was sure the people I was with loved me.
It was a smart move for me but not for my relationship.It triggered the distancing that would be the end of us.But not before a bunch of other bad shit happened.
I returned from my trip and got the news about the team disbanding. I was crushed but not surprised. A few days later I got a call from a therapist at TTC, a transitional treatment center- a halfway house where our patients would go to transition to living in the real world. she had heard about our impending demise and wanted me to apply for the milieu coordinator position there. I did and I was chosen to fill the position.This would be a good thing.
In November of 1990, my mom would call me at work with more bad news, my dad had a massive stroke and wasn't expected to live.My girlfriend's father died in January 1991.
My mom died from complications of cancer in september 1992.My dad woke up from his coma in february 1991...he thought he was at sheppard air force base and it was 1974...he didn't know who I was.He had that Marilyn Manson one pupil's bigger than the other thing happening, only it wasn't a contact lens...it was really fucking creepy...and a heartbreaking visual reminder that my dad, as I had known him, was a memory looking up at me from his hospital bed with fucked up eyes wondering who the hell I was.
Things were not going well. It was the beginning of another end.