beef bouillon

This is an embarrassing yet candid story I wrote a few months ago when my mom was in the hospital. I have conflicting feelings about putting it up here in this blog for all to read...but here goes:
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written in Fall, 2007

One thing in my family that I always found abhorrent and had an innate shame of was their need to take things. My brother pilfered things everywhere he went, and not in the cool anarchist Cometbus survival kind of way, but in the way of a person disenfranchised from the world, who needed to take what they felt was theirs as a way to survive and get the most out of someone or something they feel has more than them. In the way that they feel the world owes them because they are poor, aching inside and sometimes sick in the head. They were never big things that would hurt anyone, but rather little things like silverware, medical supplies, too many napkins, condiments.
It always bugged me.

My mom could be the same way sometimes, but never as bad as my brother. Sometimes, in moments of clarity and epiphany, I would realize exactly why they felt that way and it would make complete sense to me, but that would usually soon evaporate, because I don't really feel that way. My particular response to bad life circumstances has been different from my mom and my brother. Not better, don't get me wrong, just different. I have had my own sorted ways of coping in troubled times.

As I write this, my mom is laying in the hospital with stage IV pancreatic cancer. She is dying, and my guilt about confessing these things in a public forum bites me.
She would hate me saying even a word of this. She is an extremely private person. She always holds her head up high in public no matter what she feels inside. I admire that in her. No matter what anyone says, she has an unbreakable spirit, and I can only hope that I possess a little of her spirit in me.
I feel pretty breakable sometimes.

In the hospital, the cafeteria is a dismal excuse for a feeding place. I can never find anything I want, and the hours are rigid. Sick people and their families are NOT on an 8-5 schedule, people! I don't always want lunch exactly between the hours of 11-2PM. Sometimes I need to eat at 3 or 4PM because I haven't eaten all day.
I found myself taking bouillon packets and shoving them in my pocket before getting to the checkout line. What was I thinking? What was the reasoning behind this? Was I getting back at the hospital for being so callously indifferent to our needs or was I rebelling the fact that our family lost so much? Even scarier, was I somehow regressing to that behavior in my family that I had such a distaste for? Was it a way for me to feel closer to them? Be a part of them? What was happening? The bouillon kind of stood for something, and I don't know what. I will never use it, and it is sitting on my desk, taunting me, forcing me to question myself as I write this.