As humans we are a species organized to accept the cycle of life. We assign names to it, we refer to rituals to help us celebrate it. Customs and rituals, both religious and otherwise are practices designed to keep us together, hold families in sync with each other, and to make our worlds a little softer on the edges for all of us.
We cannot know when our last day is, our last hour, our last moment of life. We can only know it if we plan it and even then, it might not exactly happen as we have designed it. More often than not, we live our lives full in the knowledge of that moment, that time which we find ourselves breathing in, but unaware if it is our last moment of breathing out. We push the idea of our own demise right out of our consciousness and travel where we must each day and in each moment of our life, we continue to expand our experiences and if we are lucky, our understanding of them.
Age is not the defining factor, neither is illness, sometimes it just happens, the time when we just find the end of our rope is not long enough to hang onto. That can take place in an instant when something over which we might have no control over, suddenly changes the trajectory of our living into the death experience.
We can do this but once in the physical sense, but many times in a metaphorical sense. We can suddenly find ourselves in a different point of view, whilst looking forward, realize that we have been actually looking at what has been long past.
I don't know if it is actually a fact, that life speeds forward as one ages, I can only say I think it does. If there is a parallel universe to this one, and in it we are still in a part of the past, it might make sense that when the planes of existence sometimes cross that the one we are currently in might speed up to avoid crashing backwards. Maybe we are moving in such a break neck way to our own conclusions to our own story, we are like a writer who knows the begining of the story and the end, but must develop the middle.
We are trying to bring that novel to it's natural conclusion, the one which we find we understand and know and yet, we are not thinking of the end.
We are thinking of the part that we fill up, creating the action, the scenes, the developments, the fleshing out of our character.
Every Thanksgiving we pause and give some thanks, not for the end of the story, but for the action in the middle, the parts behind us and the parts yet to come. We stand either close to the end or in the middle, unknown mostly to us. We don't get to practice the hushed or vibratto good byes, we just live until we run it out, until we get the story done.
I have said good bye to so many people in my life. I have adjusted myself to their loss. I have said even more good byes to dreams, to different pieces of myself that broke off over time. I have evolved as a result of these good byes, all of them actually. I have followed the rituals required, I have mourned, I have buried, I have scattered the ash.
Yet, I realize I am still here. I am still a part of the middle. I don't understand it, but I am and I will continue to flesh out this character as best I can. In the last years my hands have told the story. I have become someone completely different than I was. I have walked a long path, and reached a place that reminds me of someone I have lost. I examine my hands and think of how, a very short time ago they held so many things, including promise.
I think that they can still grasp a bit of that. I will tell myself to hang on, until there is no more rope. My father would say, "tie a knot (in it) and hang on." Perhaps that is the real trick, to know when to quit trying to climb and just tie a knot and hang on. It is unlikely the knot will undue, and perhaps you will mark time and freeze it for a long while.
I am still here.
From my cousin the other day, He had been in remission for just over a year and a half, this is now what he faces again.
...wanted to update everyone on what my cancer doctor told me this past Thursday.....
My numbers that they track my Multiple Myloma have been going up and my maintenance drug was not working....I started taking my new chemo (12) and steroid(10) pills today - this will be once a week for I think for 12 weeks. ......set up for another stem cell transplant down at Karmanos Hospial in Detroit - maybe March. When they talk now I hear a lot of blah...blah...blah. Just what I wanted more doctor visits.........
Why am I telling you all.....I don't know...... thought this way you don't hear anything second hand.....maybe get an extra prayer or two. (edited)
Copyright 2011 by SheilaTGTG55
