Sometimes they write themselves
It’s been an odd week on this journey. I say that like life has been anything but odd in the last almost 16 months. Damn…it really will be 16 months on Thursday, and we’ll be half-way through November and pushing right into the holidays. It’ll be Thanksgiving, Christmas, camp, then the family trip, and I’ll look up and it’ll be March, and his birthday again.
One day at a time. I have to take it one day at a time. I could be dead before March.
I think about that constantly now. I didn’t really focus on my own mortality with such an attitude of “this is entirely feasible” until A died so suddenly and unexpectedly from something that was apparently killing him slowly for who knows how long. My heart could fail before I finish this sentence. I could be in a car accident on the way to work tomorrow. I could contract fatal pneumonia from any number of Typhoid Marys at work who wander about spewing their germs as if their only conception about how disease is spread dates back to the Middle Ages. A block of airplane waste could hurtle through the sky and strike me dead when I get the mail. I could have an aneurysm. My 26-year-old neighbor, back when I lived in Minnesota, died of an aneurysm. She left work one day with a sick headache, and within a day or so she was gone, leaving behind a husband and a 3-year-old daughter. Anytime I have a headache I cannot pinpoint the source of, I think of her. When I walk alone at night, I have visions of being kidnapped and murdered, or accidentally hit by a car that doesn’t see me crossing the street.
I don’t know why I think of these things, but I do, and I can’t stop. It’s always the worst-case scenario that insinuates itself in my mind. I think maybe it’s because I know, intimately, that death walks with us everywhere, and you never really know when your time is up. I’m pretty sure that A didn’t know Friday night that he was going to die Saturday morning. I’m sure he was as surprised as any of us. You never know when you will lose the ones you love, or when it will be your turn. We all know that life is terminal, but even if you have a more specific terminal diagnosis, you still don’t know when the end will come. I know of people who were given 3 weeks and lasted another year. I know of others who were given 6 months and lasted 3 days.
The thing about these thoughts is I’m very philosophical about them, as creepy as some of them are, because I no longer believe I have any control over mortality. I figure if I don’t smoke and don’t purposely throw myself in front of moving vehicles or off bridges, I’ve done just about all I can to extend my life on this planet. I don’t believe in macrobiotic diets or yoga or colonics or any number of various magical offerings that supposedly will keep me healthy, supple, and immortal. I know better, and this carcass of mine is in pretty rough shape now, a week shy of 36 years. I’m more afraid of living in this body for another 20 years than I am of dying. Jesus, there’s not enough ibuprofen in the world…
I am not afraid of death for myself since A died, which I suppose is good for me. But I don’t want to leave my loved ones behind because I know how bad it hurts, and I don’t want them to know that pain. And I don’t want them to leave me because I know how bad it hurts, and I don’t want to know any more of that pain. It is not death that scares me; it’s pain.
I always thought I was going to die young, and when A died, a friend remembered me telling her that and suggested that perhaps I was right, but that it was that only a part of me would die young, rather than my own body, and I thought maybe she was right. It was a big part, though.
For a long time, I’d let go of that fear of dying young, but since A passed, I feel it again, though not as a fear this time, but rather, a likelihood, and I don’t know why. I keep thinking I’m going to die of cancer before I am an old lady, and I don’t know why. Is it a premonition? Or is it that I am so traumatized by the reality of mortality, stripped of all illusions that such things don’t happen to people I deem “too young to die,” and the knowledge that some kind of a cancer, according to all the news, seems likely to touch all of us personally in some form before we leave this world? Has the too intimate touch of Death made me morbid, or realistic? Am I psychic or psychotic? Is this a perspective that is now mine to keep, or just another stage in this journey as I try to reckon with death as a personal reality instead of a concept that happens to someone else?
I don’t know. I keep going back to the phrase I read in a book, something to the effect of “I cannot know the truth about myself; I can only live it.” I don’t know, but I don’t know that the things that I wonder most about are mine to know.
This is not at all the post I meant to write tonight, nor is it the post I started; however, it seems to be the post I needed to write.