It's futile to shake my fist at the sky, but I feel better when I do

I'm mad at the universe. No, not mad. Seething. Enraged.
I do not pretend to understand the machinations of the world, nor to have the perspective to see my role as but a cog in this existence, but it all seems so brutally unfair.
First, I watched my mom die. A giant personality of a woman, reduced to a pale shadow, raspy-breathed and unseeing, before she took one last breath and slipped away. Too soon.
She made this world greater. It is less without her.
Death is part of life, I know, but to have THIS happen to my family just two weeks later? Unforgivable.
Michael was a good man, a caring man, who - like my mom - spent his life helping kids. He helped children, for christ's sake. And his fate, his lot in life, was to be murdered, have his head chopped off, and to be torched in his truck.
I don't believe in God, but if there is one, and he can hear me, I have two words to say: fuck you.

Living with dying

It was pain. It was shock. It was life.
I stood over my mom, lying pale and prone in the bed, her eyes wide open and bulging, as she tried to comprehend what was happening to her.
"What's going on, Jake?" she asked.
"We're at the hospice," I said.
"We'll be going home soon," I lied.
The clarity and lucidity in her eyes faded as the drugs reasserted themselves, and she slipped once again into a morphine-clouded haze.
I gave her hand a reassuring squeeze, then slipped into my own haze, one of grief and pain.
My mom is dying. There is nothing I can do about it.
Hope, once my greatest ally in our battle against mom's cancer, had deserted me. It's like that crazy homeless man on the street would scream at random, to no one in particular: Abandon all hope ye, who enter here.
"Here," is the Richmond Road hospice in Victoria. It's where my mother has come to die. She doesn't want to be here, and she doesn't want to die, but those options have been taken away from her. From us.
Time keeps on slipping, the Neville brothers say. And it does. In May, the doctors gave my mom two months to a year to live. It's been two months. The revised estimate is now measured in days. For my sister and I, we are measuring it in hours.
The sadness and emotion that clings to us now ebbs and flows like a tide. You can fend it off - or fool yourself into thinking you are - until it decides to wash over you, engulfing you, breaking down every defence you have and reducing you to a sobbing, broken shell.
It is not the impending death that is sawing into our souls. It's the suffering and frustration our mother is going through. Doped up with a myriad different medications, the pain still shows on her face; she scrunches it up like she's tasting my cooking for the first time again.
This cannot last. It can't. It just can't.

"Death's pale rider knocks at the door of kings and men alike." - Horace