My Sister Is Gone And I Don’t Know How Much Longer I Can Stay In This Apartment

Location: NEPA (Pennsylvania)

This is my first time ever posting something on reddit but i’ve been watching a lot of videos on youtube of reddit stories and figured why not. Can’t hurt to see some advice and possibly help from the community on here. Also i apologize in advance if this isn’t the right subreddit to post this but I have no idea where to post. Anyways here’s my situation (it’s kind of a long story)

Before I get into my current situation I feel I should give some context to what has happened leading up to this point in my life. I (24M) have been living in PA since I moved here in 2019 with my parents. While I was still in college and working in I wanna say it was around 2021-2022 I had lost my cousin to a blood clot in his brain and a couple weeks later my oldest sister was diagnosed with breast cancer. My sister at the time was living alone in Tennessee at the time of her diagnosis and was grieving the loss of our cousin who was like another brother to her. To my knowledge they had caught the cancer fairly early but she refused to do chemotherapy or have surgeries done since she was all alone and wanted to try the holistic route of recovery. She eventually came around and went through the whole ordeal of surgeries and medication and chemo treatments. This was all over the span of 2 years. The cancer kept coming back and because of this my parents suggested to her that she should move to PA and goto some of the doctors around here and in NY (which is where we grew up). She agreed and that year she moved in with my uncle to continue seeking medical care to hopefully do away with this cancer. For some context me and my sister are extremely close I’d say she’s easily top 3 most important people to me but all my life she was never really around and I had only ever met her and got to hang out with her in person maybe 4-5 times in my life so when I heard she was going to be moving in with my uncle I was over the moon. I’d finally be able to see my sister again and make up for lost time while also being able to be there for her as a support system with her cancer battle. After around 6 months of living with my uncle she found an apartment, me being 22 at the time and still living with my parents saw an opportunity to finally be able to move out and spend more time with my sister and leaped at the chance to ask her if I could move in with her and help with rent and whatever else she needed to which she agreed. Fast forward a little bit after living together for close to a year I had gotten fired from my job at Fedex. This plunged me into financial ruin that i’m still to this day trying to get out of. My sister during this time was in the middle of her 4th time going through full chemo treatment so we were struggling for awhile. A couple months later I had gotten my CDL and started a job as a motor coach operator. Things were finally starting to look up for us as I was able to contribute to the apartment again as well as start to dig myself out of the financial hole I was in from being unemployed. My sister had just finished her last chemo session and was officially cancer free. Her battle with cancer for YEARS was finally coming to an end.. or so we thought. Maybe about a month and a half after she finished her chemo she had a doctors appointment to do a check up on everything and they found another lump in her chest. My sister was completely devastated at the news. By this point the cancer had come back 4 times and she just didn’t have it in her to go through it all again. So she didn’t. My sister was a very private person so she only told me little bits and pieces here and there but when she told me it was back and that she didn’t have it in her to fight it anymore it hit me like a truck. I naïvely tried to trick myself into believing that everything would be ok and that we’d find a way to get through this. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. As the months went on I slowly saw my sister get worse and worse as her health slowly deteriorated. But I still tried to hold on to the faith that she’d be ok and some miracle would happen but then this past May while at work my mom had called me to tell me that my sister was went to their house and told them the cancer had become terminal. Her recent doctors visit revealed that it had spread all over her body and metastasized. I felt my world cave in when i heard the news. I did my best to hold it together as I continued to finish my route dropping off passengers and by the time I got back to my car I fell apart. She never told us how much time she had left or anything like that so I was in constant fear of the unknown. Around the end of June this year she had texted me saying she was going to the hospital so they could drain the fluid from her lungs again and I didn’t really think anything of it as this was a fairly common thing and assumed to would be home the next day. A day and a half later i got a call from my sisters friend (who was her emergency contact) saying that the hospital had called her saying to get the family together because my sister was nearing the end. By the end of that week my sister was gone..

Now for where i’m at today and why i’m posting this here. Following the months after my sisters passing up to this point I still live in our apartment, I had my girlfriend move in to help with bills and I was recently moved to part time at my job because of all the days I had to call off to take care of my sister. I thought that after some time i’d be able to heal and come to terms with living in this apartment but it feels like it’s sucking the soul out of me. I had plans to move to texas with my girlfriend and some of our friends in early may but I decided to stay here because i didn’t know how much time i had left with my sister but now i’m stuck. I have no money living paycheck to paycheck and my landlord just had me sign a year long lease even though i basically begged her to keep it month to month like she had with my sister cause I wanted to move out of the apartment as soon as I was financially able because of how much it’s affecting me mentally. I feel like i’m starting to lose my mind because i’m trying to grieve my sister and heal in an apartment that still smells like her and is a constant reminder she’s gone, while trying to afford to live off a part time paycheck and my girlfriends retail income and still trying to save so i can move out of this state to texas where im happy.

What can I do? I honestly don’t know if i’ll be able to mentally and emotionally handle living in this apartment for another year and I don’t know what repercussions me and my girlfriend may face if we break the lease and move out early. And I can’t afford to move somewhere else in PA nor do I want to because everything here reminds me of my sister and it’s driving me insane.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated and if anyone could help us financially as much as I genuinely hate to ask it would help tremendously. I’m at a complete loss and just wanna get through this extremely difficult time in my life.

I know this post was super long winded and Im sorry if some of it didn’t make any sense but if any of you have questions feel free to ask and i’ll try to respond to as many people as I can. Thank you for your time.