Death and Stuff

When you have a chronic illness you notice death more.  You fight it daily in tiny ways.  "Sorry, can't have a beer with ya, my medicine....," "I'll pass on that donut," "I have to find some shade, I react badly to the heat...."

I was looking out our dining room window this morning, counting rooftops and watching the streets stretch and yawn as they came to life, and recalled the movie we watched last night, Astronaut Farmer.  One of the underlying ideas in the movie is how tiny we are, how insignificant, and as I watched a red minivan crawl up the hill on E Street I realized that if I were to die, whoever that was in that soccer-mom's-steed wouldn't have any idea...and wouldn't care to.  My death wouldn't matter to millions and millions of people.  This didn't come to me as a morose, woe is me kind of thought; it was a realistic, statistical bit of trivia for me to ponder. Instead of leaving me with a helpless feeling, it sparked my thought process and led me down several winding paths of ideas and observations.

One was this idea of fighting death on an everyday basis.  As I was looking out the window watching Golden Hill's morning routine unfold, I was practicing my own: pulling pills from bottles and taking them one by one.  One half-pill for my blood sugar, one half-pill for anti-anxiety, two pills for blood pressure, one for cholesterol, a vitamin for nutrition, an iron pill for anemia and energy, and an L-Lysene to counter any viral anythings that might be floating around.  This is another slow battle against death that I wage each day.

Another path led me, as always, to Mom.  You can slow Diabetes down, but rarely can you reverse it entirely, or stop it from eventually catching up to you.  My mother had Type 1 Diabetes (I have Type 2), and always talked about feeling like an 20 year-old trapped in an 80 year-old's body. At 39, I'm getting just a small taste of what she truly meant by that. For her, fighting death wasn't just a daily routine, it was the the driving force behind each breath- she was much more aware of it on a conscious level than I am.  She was told at the age of 14 that she would be lucky to make it to forty.  Later in life, doctors often said she was alive due to sheer will.  She died at forty-seven.

 And thinking of Mom, I always think of her sense of humor- which led me to Terry Pratchett's character of Death in his Discworld series.  It is probably the most appealing portrayal of death I've encountered and I often find myself hoping he's onto something.  Pratchett's Death has always made me grin- here is this big mystery, this idea I have struggled with for years, this macabre vagueness we are all headed straight for...and he speaks in all caps, has this nice mix of innocence and wisdom, and is as mystified by humans and this "life" thing we lead as we are mystified by him.  There are times he just doesn't get us, and times he offers brilliant insights into human character and what we're all about.  And I think that's the crux of why I like this idea of death so much.  It's so, so human.  I can grasp it.  I can totally see Death and mom hanging out, dusting the hourglasses in Death's house while discussing their latest gripe with the Auditors of Reality.  I think mom and Death's granddaughter, Susan, would get along particularly well.

 So all of these trails of thought just tend to branch off into more trails.  They become a never-ending network of images and words that I envision like a mess of veins forming a circulatory system roaming around my mind.  They just keep circling around and around and end up back at the beginning, which leads to more offshoots and explorations.  There is rarely any conclusion, any set end that I can grasp and claim as final. 

This doesn't make me sad like it used to, or angry. I have come to accept it on some level, and grown curious about the enigma of death.  We may not know what exactly we're fighting against every day, but then who wants to battle the familiar day in and day out?  What kind of fight would it be without a challenge?