In a cruel word, loss is the sweetest torment.

It is the crippling proof that you cared, that you became irrevocably attached …

… and that, like everything in this world, even those you love and hold dearest inevitably wither away.

But in-between the beginning and the end, in those cherished moments you shared, the feelings that blossomed, that thrive and drive you, they are real. Heartbreakingly real.

And for all the pain lost love brings on its wings, you would never want to miss a single memory.

What a cruel world we live in, indeed, a world so breathtakingly merciless.

I was five when my mother was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, a sickness that over time corroded her mind, making the brain wither away in certain areas and taking with it the mother I knew and loved. There was no treatment, no wonder waiting to happen. A hopeless situation, one my fix year old self couldn't even begin to grasp … I was a child. Maybe it was for the best. Sadly, it didn't stand up to reality. That day in the hospital was the first time I heard the word 'terminal'. It wouldn't be the last. And it was the beginning of a terrible understanding for me: The world wascruel, and its cruelty was a terminal disease that held no cure. When all that is left behind of your own mother is a faded caricature, a mockery, you stop hoping. Begging. Pleading. You look at your mom and know that the miracle you prayed for will never happen.

You learn to cry silently at night, beneath the wrinkled covers, when no one can hear, no one can see you, alone in your despair.

I was seven when she started to really forget me, and the woman who had born me swore that I was an evil illusion of her mind out to kill her; that I wasn't real, a figment of her fantasy created to taunt her with a gift she would never be able to experience. She cursed my name, saying that she had no children and that death looming over her had long ago made her resign such childish wishes. She never would have children. Death would claim her before she could hold her own baby in her arms. There was nothing but surety in her poisoned words as she screamed at me. Clearly, she would remember me if she ever had a child … and in-between, when her mind would become lucid for the shortest of minutes, free of demons, she did. She remembered. I hated when she remembered me. It never lasted, those cruel moments of hope. It never lasted.

You learn to hunch into yourself, to slip in the shadows and cover beneath furniture just to be near her without eliciting her rage, all the while knowing that her pain is so much greater than your own.

I was eight when her body finally joined her mind, and my mother's casket was lowered into the muddy ground, taking with it the last remains of the woman who was our world, our sun and moon, and the one to always keep us together. The one to bridge our differences, to lighten the day with a laugh or a smile, her eyes so bright and full of life that you couldn't help to want her attention, to be near and dear to such an exceptional person. For the last two, nearly three years she had been slowly but steadily dying, and even though at end, nothing of my mom remained, I loved her. The idea of never seeing her again … it was unfathomable.

Impossible.

… happening.

It was the day the world went cold and grey.

And I wished nothing more than for the sun to remain gone.

You don't know if you want to keep going on.

Sometimes, pain makes the world go silent.

For years afterwards, we were deaf.

To each other.

To ourselves.

I was ten when my grandmother was diagnosed with lung cancer, a sickness that transformed the proud woman I had so many fond memories of into a physical wreck that tried to smile for our sake. After losing mom just two years ago, it was a shock no one knew what to do about. We tried to be there, but she insisted on looking after herself. I tried to console myself with the thought that cancer, at least, was treatable, and she would power through that damnable disease, fighting and triumphing. She was one of the strongest women I knew, and I adored her. Like a child, I clung to this hope … until the day she uttered that thrice-damned word: terminal.

You wonder, again and again, how many tears you can cry, how many sleepless nights you can survive, until the will to go on finally breaks.

I was eleven when she, at long last, moved in with us. With grandpa having been dead for ten years by now, there was nothing keeping her in the old house all by her lonesome and she came to us once her doctor's told her to look into arranging her affairs; taking over the reign of the family once she saw the ruins mom had left behind. Our silent heavy house slowly became a fragile little home again. With time and care, she knitted back together our broken family, bringing father and son nearer to each other than ever.

For the first time in a long while, I didn't dread coming home from school to that cold silent house, empty and lonely. After years, I came back to a home that was warm and inviting and there was someone there who wanted me to be with them; someone who saw me as more than a painful mocking memory of their dead wife.

Everything went to hell four months later, when she collapsed during one of our cooking lessons she insisted on, coughing so deeply, so heavily, her frail old body wrecked and shaking as blood poured out of her mouth, and all I could do was to frantically call an ambulance and hold her hand as she laid in my arms, gurgling blood, still trying to comfort me. Sometimes, it feels as if the blood on my hands from that day never went away, always reminding me of the mortality of those I cared for.

You know that people die, you know that everything that has a beginning also does have an end, but when you hear your father curse at nights, when you listen to your grandma telling herself that in death, at least, she will be united with her beloved, you fill nothing but pain and anger. And you hat yourself for soaking up those moments you share with your grandma, when putter around the house together, because you love every second of it while knowing that she is preparing you for the time that she leaves this world, leaving your dad and yourself behind. Once more.

I was thirteen when she succumbed to the cancer that had been eating her alive, surrounded by her son and grandson, one of her hands in dad's, one in mine, our faces stained with tears that wouldn't stop. And she just smiled before her eyes closed and she drifted off into her final sleep. It nearly felt like losing mom all over again, the world surrendering whatever traces of colour grandma had managed to reintroduce to the grey of grief, fading into a bleakness that hollowed out my heart.

This time, I tried to cling to the memories of happiness and stay strong, if not for myself than for dad. For the last family I had, I would do everything to stay strong, even lying and denying myself. I would tread on this cruel world, thrive and rise above it, so that dad had a reason to stay, to be proud of me and fight on. We were family, grandma had shown us that, and even loss, no matter how petrifying, could destroy this one simple truth.

Maybe I couldn't do much, but I would not go down without a fight for our family.

Your love, you learn, you lie and you lay down, but in the end, what gets you through the day, is the little bit of tomorrow that greets you so promisingly.

I was seventeen when dad made us both sit down at the table, face tired and serious, and as his words echoed in the house like they would in a tomb, the cracked bit of reality I clung to shattered along with my heart and mind.

Because even when good intentions don't plaster the way to hell, sometimes they just ain't strong enough to make any difference.

At all.

I had researched them.

It. Whatever.

That's what I do.

I research things until every little detail is noted down.

It's what I have always done.

Sometimes it calms me, and sometimes it makes everything even more terrible.

This research?

Frontotemporal dementia.

Lung cancer.

Diseases.

Terminal.

Hereditary.

I had done my research. I had collecting knowledge, had forced myself to look at the way reality seemed to taunt me. Nevertheless, I soaked it up.

It was a painful kind of unwilling preparation.

It shouldn't have come as a shock. I knew the statistics. I knew the probabilities.

It shouldn't have come as a shock.

Why, then, couldn't I breathe.

There was a time when I counted my memories in events that dominated specific years. That stood out. For the longest time, it was sickness and death that made my life memorable. Pain. Fear. Desperation. Hopelessness.

I was alone.

… or I felt alone.

Not quite the same difference, but back then, in my numbness I couldn't tell.

It was a bothersome way of existence.

But then – then they started to arrive: friends, family, pack. Slowly, ever so gradually slowly, my monotone world, this empty space I had tried to fill with information, random bits and pieces, started to fill up with something vastly different - love, happiness, memories that made me smile. Bright hopeful colours.

And I smiled so brightly the first time I noticed that I counted my memories by the people I loved, not with the terrible things that happened to them. Life is bittersweet, and we are living it in a cruel world. After all this time, I understood and accepted that laughter came with tears, and happiness with the need for something. I could look at my friends and appreciate their presence, bask in the pack bonds and let myself fall with trust.

They would catch me.

It was an exhilarating feeling, one that was simple addictive.

One that was recuperated.

It didn't come as a shock. I knew that they cared. I knew that I trusted them.

Because when I cried, my world ripped away for the third time, I allowed them to hold me, to surround and support me. To give me reason to go on.

Because even when colours seem like they mock you, those closest to you will always be your guiding lights.

Just trust.

I was seventeen when my dad told me that he was diagnosed with lung cancer, and that it was too late for treatments; he had ignored and hid the symptoms for so long that all the doctor could say was to get comfortable.It was the third time in my life that I heard the word terminal, and the panic that followed was suffocating. The kind of suffocating I had grown to control after grandma's death reared its ugly head. We were caught in a loop of fear and pain. The more I had watch powerless as my father faded away, his body ravaged by sickness and his mind dominated by worries about leaving me behind, the less I could breathe and move one. Every day, the stone-cold weight in my chest, driving tears to my eyes with every breath, seemed to suck the reason out of life just a little bit more. And I was helpless to save dad, because all that was left to try was the bite; and all the bite would to for him was kill him faster. Derek had already regretfully confirmed that dad was too weak to survive the transition to werewolf, taking the last hope I held.

You are floating away, and the more you want to stay and change things for the better, the more distanced, dissociative you become. Are you already drowning?

I was eighteen when he was shot. When my sick, dying father threw himself in the way of a wolfs bane bullet meant to kill me as punishment for being a wolf lover. It wasn't fair! Nothing of this was fair, not at all. How could he make me promise, bleeding out on my arms, not from the hated disease that had been killing him but because he saved me, that I would keep living on? That I would fight through this hell to come out a survivor? But he smiled. My father died, as he had always wished to die, for one of his loved ones, with a smile on his face. I wished I didn't love him so much, so that I could hate him for leaving, but I couldn't.

In the aftermath, when I was able to think, when the fog started to lighten at least, all I felt was those warm arms around me, keeping the cold away and tethering me. The bonds of family, of pack.

Holding me together.

I hated and loved it equally.

On some days escaping this cruel world seems so alluring so right. But I know. I know that I can't, not now, not like that.

Years after seeing dad die, after losing my family, I can only now look at the old picture books we used to collect, and allow the memories to resurface, to look back and reminisce on the good and the bad. The pack, my self-collected family, is what keeps me going now, and I'm old enough to acknowledge that without them, I wouldn't have survived past my father's death.

Even so, it took a long time until I could even start looking at life like it meant anything at all. Back then, when nothing seemed like it mattered at all, when I was listless, borderline anorexic, insomniac … they kept me afloat.

Scott. Allison. Lydia. Jackson. Danny. Isaac. Erica. Boyd. Peter. Cora. Malia. Ethan. Aiden. Liam.

… Derek.

I have known so much pain, so much torment. How could I willingly put those I loved through the same hell that made and unmade me? How could I give up?

I couldn't.

For them, I couldn't.

Sometimes, I like to imagine that they look down at me, from heaven or whatever afterlife there is, and that they are smiling.

That maybe they are even a bit proud of the man I have become. Of the child that grew up.

It is a nice thought.

… grandma, dad, mom.

I hope that wherever you are, you are happy.

~The End.~