Only the Strong Survive

And even they don't survive forever.

Awoke with a head filled with black thoughts. Unable to understand why this injury, which is certainly non-fatal and is even in the long run non-disabling, has me so whipped. I think the answer can be found in the primal instinct to live and thrive—an instinct that I should rejoice in. I can't speak for the rest of the human race, but I know I have a horrendous fear of what my old friend DN used to call "the big D." (He was a huge fan of "the big L," but that's another blog post altogether.)

I keep having flashbacks to different incidents during the last four years of my mother's life. She went from being an ambulatory and sentient senior citizen to being a wheelchair-bound little old lady lost in her own diminishing world of patchy memory and various degrees of pain. Before she died last July I don't think I really believed in death as anything other than what happened to some other people. I didn't hold with decay—thought it came from being careless. These aren't attitudes I could have articulated, but in retrospect I know I owned them.

The day I sat by her bed for two hours as she lay upon it, cold and finally, irrevocably still, I became a believer. If this woman I'd known since the instant of my birth, this vital, complicated, intelligent, strong person, could up and die, well, all bets were suddenly off.

I have done some reading in Zen, and have learned that I need to accept that everything and everyone I hold dear (including my own hide) will eventually be lost to me. OK, fine. Dandy. I can deal. But now—it's hey! Everything and everyone, well, fine—but not my running! Not my strong, fit body! Ah, the difference between reading and living. If my legs can fail me, what's to stop everything else? My mind? My heart? And I won't even go to the people I love—does this mean they could go too?

I know I am not original in coming to this awareness. My challenge is to cop to it and to live with it and to appreciate what I do have. Which is a surfeit of riches. Including my Z, who has been a saint through this fit I've been having. Holy guacamole, I've been impossible to live with. From here, I'm figuring, I can only improve!