I should have known better than to start, then publicize, a blog with so lighthearted a name as "The Glorious Whimsy". With a nod to some of my more enlightened friends and certain philosophies extolling the virtue of positive thinking and the laws of attraction and such like, I did, though.
Which is why I haven't posted for two months.
There goes my resolve to blog every day. There it goes for nearly sixty consecutive days.
I have my reasons, of course. Chief among them is the fact that of late, I have begun to feel like the Angel of Death. It's everywhere, and it's all the time. Four deaths in three months, and it will be five deaths shortly as a family member approaches the end of his battle with stage four stomach cancer.
Death is not new to me. It has been an all too frequent caller since I was seven - my grandfather... a few years later, my grandmother... a cousin... a neighborhood friend, a teacher, a classmate, my father, his parents, another friend, and another and another and another - the most bizarre deaths, too, not just your bog standard death-at-the-end-of-a-long-life-well-lived. There were a few of those; but truthfully, most were more remarkable. Death following horribly cruel and protracted illnesses, death following the sudden manifestation of a problem nobody knew about, a crash, a drowning, a murder, exsanguination, painfully early deaths - it just goes on like that.
While one never truly gets used to the idea that literally EVERY SINGLE PERSON YOU KNOW is going to pop their clogs one day - and no fair guessing, you can't know when - I previously thought I'd got comfortable with the concept.
G-d and I are good; I died briefly once myself. (To quote Monty Python, I got better.) It was at the end of an extremely routine surgery and the surgeon told me that I just...stopped. Flatline, no breathing, no pulse. They jammed the breathing tube back into me, pumped things up again and hey presto, back to life. You're welcome.
And I know how to make peace with people. I can negotiate the choppy waters of The End of things - relationships, jobs, lives. I know how to grieve, I understand the process, I accept the universal truth of it. But it still rattles me. Every. Single. Time. Even when you expect it, it rattles the nerves and brings you spang up against your own mortality in an exceedingly unpleasant way.
And I'm not used it it. I'm not.
I'm sick of it. I hate it. I hate the unpredictability and the inevitability and the relentless permanence of it.
When you grapple with clinical (and I mean clinical) Anxiety Disorder, the idea that one day without any warning at all, people will be gone from your life (perversely, the good ones, more often than not) and there will be nothing you can do - no amount of crying or wishing or praying will undo it, there is no court of appeals - no undo button, no do over, nothing - checkmate, end game, full stop - well.
Every day becomes a special kind of hell. I find myself wondering whether it would be better to start culling people so the losses are fewer, because it may be preferable to not seeing someone to whom you are close ever again.
Until, of course - well - but - views on what happens AFTER vary widely. Mine are favorable and rather nice, really. But having some significant experience on long distance relationships with the living, during which you must go extended periods of time without seeing each other, I am none too keen on the extended period of time I must go without seeing or speaking with my beloved decedents. Then again, I'm not keen to join them, either.
And by this time in my life, you'd think - or at least, I'd thought - I'd be a bit more rooted, grounded, secure...tethered and fortified and able to deal with it all a bit better. But no.
No.
After my father died, and I mean really after - after the funeral and the cards and the flowers and the people all go home and get on with their lives while you're left to contend with the giant hole in yours... I remember choking on my own insomnia. I would fall asleep at one, two in the morning and wake up to see the first fiery sliver of sun appear in the sky. And I remember sitting in traffic, looking at the lights changing and everyone serenely driving through them.
And for the first time, I grasped the notion that the earth really does just keep turning. Night falls, the moon shines, the stars peek out, the owls call...the sun rises, and you are expected to get up and continue living.
I did, of course.
And I will.
The skies these days are full of milky sunlight, the kind which precedes the warmth of spring but gives one a bit of hope that it won't always be winter. Through the haze, sometimes I think I can feel the seasons shifting gears, can practically hear the shift in the trees, the wind, the ocean.
And now I clench up inside and wonder what changes they will bring. Who else will die?
It's no way to go through life, that.
So I'm trying to shift my own gears and ask a different question - will you live?
And I don't mean will you keep on with the breathing and the brain waves - I mean - will you LIVE? Will you embrace opportunities and go and do and say and really LIVE as much as you can? Despite the cruelty and horror and fear and ugliness that pervades this business of earthly existence?
As with the name of this blog, I will only know later if this will prove true, but for right now, right this moment, I choose to answer yes. Yes, I will.
Details to follow, I suppose.
Hm.
Yes.
