My life in the past 5 years.

So I was thinking to myself, “When did I become so serious?” I used to be carefree and a lot more go with the flow and I didn’t used to worry so much about my future. Now I have a career, I’m thinking about buying a place, marriage, and children and over all just settling down. So I said to myself, what’s happened, what’s changed in my life over the past 5 years and when I really started thinking about it, it started making a whole lot of sense. I guess it all started when I turned 21, my mother’s best friend, who is like a second mother to me was diagnosed with breast cancer, shortly after that I experienced my first close family deaths, I lost two of my grandmothers in the same week, followed by my mom going into acute kidney failure (for the second time), my uncle (my mom’s younger brother) who was 49 at the time, died from lung cancer, my mother went on dialysis and then just a little under a year later, had her second kidney transplant (which had not gone smoothly), I lost my job and suffered from some pretty major depression, my 20 year old cat had to be put down, I lost a grandfather and then another one a few months later. I got my heart broken; my brother’s father-in-law was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died a year later, followed closely by my mom being diagnosed with skin cancer that had spread to her lymph nods. That brings us to present day where my last grandfather died a few weeks ago and my mom had major surgery a few days after that, which will be followed by radiation, which is still to come. In our family we are the type of people to not complain, take things as they come, deal with it and move on. But I guess it does take its toll and alters who you are. Looking at it all being written down it seems like a lot and may even seem over whelming for some and that is probably why I have become as serious as I’ve gotten older, but I know that it is just life and I have to deal with it or it will control me.