The long way back to DA. A story of life and death

It´s been a very long time since my last post here… It was July 18th 2012, 2 days before my 32nd birthday. A lot happened since then…More than I could ever imagine…more than I thought I could handle…

I´ve been working since 2002 with the people of Trimarchi www.trimarchidg.net . 2012 was the year they decided I was the one they would trust to administrate the whole graphics design congress and eventually their other projects…Lots of numbers, budget meetings, accountants,  lawyers, pressure…A lot of pressure… I gave my best and pushed my adaptation capabilities to the limit and it all was an unprecedented success…A strange sense of triumph comes from doing this kind of things right… It´s a different kind of brain reaction because logic and numbers are processed with the left side of the brain and creativity and images are processed with the right side…
So, TRImarchiDG 2012 was the year we finally nailed the event 100% … The congress ended October the 14th.  

While I was tackling this new job, my mother got another (yes, another) autoimmune disease (July). Luckily this one didn´t lead her to the O.R. for a major organ removal like the previous one…Phew!

I finished Monster Hunting Dummy 3 after doing issue number 2 and Matt the writer asked me to re do issue number 1 that was done by Luciano Vecchio because of the art continuity…Oh yeah! That was crazy…Doing issue 2, 3 and then number 1…Crazy…

My brother and his wife decided to move to Germany to work and study…That was hard to processed at the time (August)… My brother and me had never been more than 400 kms apart in all of our life…Little did I know about the hard times ahead…

September went with the pressure of the month previous to TRImarchiDG…And then October came. We had a close encounter with a "sport mafia" that threatened the realization of the event on schedule but, since we are really lovable people we dodged that bullet with a wink and a smile…Not literally but that´s sort of what happened…

After the event I went to see my father because I hadn´t seen him since the beginning of October. I wanted to surprise him so, I went to his workplace without telling him …

I was the one that got surprised…

In those 2 weeks my father had lost 9 kg (19.9 lbs) and his skin was yellow…Simpson yellow…He told me that he had to go the next day to the doctor to get the results of the tests that will tell him if he had hepatitis or something else so I went with him…

I clearly remember him telling me: - If this isn´t hepatitis it´s cancer-…

He was right…Pancreatic cancer… On top of that the tumor had obstructed his liver (hence the yellow color) so he needed an operation to get his liver working again.
We started to see all kind of doctors and possible treatments…But there was little hope…Or so the doctors told me…I decided that my father didn´t need to know that…I wasn´t going to risk him getting depressed and feeling defeated if there was a chance to fight…

I told my brother and he began planning to come back from Germany…That was really helpful because it was a lot of pressure just for myself…A shared burden is just half the weight… And so November started. My mother and stepfather went on their first vacation after 3 years so my brother had to wait for them to get back so they can change the plane ticket because he had used my mother´s credit card.

He arranged everything there and bought a ticket to our ancestors island (Ischia) to know the place where my grandparents were born…My father never went there so my brother wanted to surprise him with some images and such…

My mother and stepfather got back from their vacation. They were going to change my brother´s plane ticket the day after the arrival…

And then, all of the sudden my stepfather died…  

My mother was destroyed, my stepfather´s daughters were too…So, I took care of everything…funeral, cremation, and all the papers and shit that come with the death of a loved one…

My brother changed his plane ticket and arrived 2 days later…It was November the 19th.

Finally I had my brother to help me with our dad. We started sharing visits to the doctors, hospital and such. My father went in and out of the hospital several times. Operation, transfusions, tests…He started a treatment while waiting for his body to be well enough to get chemotherapy…And he started feeling better.

November ended and December started. We had our mother dealing with her loss and our father fighting cancer….

And then 2013 started…New year, new life they say…

And it brought a new life indeed…January surprised us with the news that my wife was pregnant…
After 9 years together, after 9 years of being a stepfather I´ll finally evolve to father…Such joy…
There are no words to describe how much strength this gave me…
And I was going to need it…  

After a long battle finally my father´s body was well enough to get chemotherapy, the drugs were on their way, he was ready and eager because he was starting to feel some pain and some trouble breathing.
He was filled with hope and anxiety…
He didn´t know how far the cancer had spread over his body and that helped him to keep battling the disease.
And then, 3 days before his first chemotherapy session, he didn´t woke up…
It was January the 27th…

Talk about the circle of life unfolding right in front of me…
I´m still trying to process the whole thing...I´m still doing papers and legal shit...
They say a boy becomes a man when he stops being a son to become a father...Well, that happened to me in every aspect...  

Now I´m back here with lots of things I did over this cyber absence because I never stopped doing what I love.  

Thanks a lot for taking time to read this…I really appreciate it…Now I have to answer the comments and notes that had piled up here and the new ones that will come.  

I´ll do my best to be here as much as possible because the DA community has given me a lot and I want to be thankful and worthy of that.

A toast to life and another one to death. Beginning and end of the same thread.  

Death is a process that takes a lifetime…We have to make sure it is a good process.

Love.