Tag: life

Kossack Stranded Wind has a diary on the rec list today entitled Contemplating Human Extinction, wherein he offers charts and graphs and doomsday projections about the upcoming “extinction event” and it’s already too late to change it. Now Buhdy has an essay here on the recent passing of his mother, and it made me cry because it’s as beautiful as it is sad. Here I’d like to note a few things wrong with the Doomsday View of Life, and hopefully touch on something beautiful too.

My hubby and I decided way back in the dim recesses of the late 1960s that we’d only have two children, not wishing to contribute to what was apparent even back then about overpopulation and increasing stress on resources plus pollution issues. That’s just what we did, too – had a girl and then a boy, then purposely joined the ranks of the non-reproducing. That way I didn’t have to spend my life wondering if I’d get cancer from birth control pills or ever have to face the hard question of abortion (which I wouldn’t have chosen, I don’t think). From there we went on to adopt three children no one else wanted yet were already housebroken, and ended up with a long line of other people’s troubled teens who decided our house was better than their own. Some of them grew up okay, some of them are still messed up, and a few of them died along the way (including our son). Life is like that. I was never the best of mothers, I suppose, but that’s okay too.

Now that our grandchildren are well into reproductive age and we’re looking to finally do what WE want to do with the rest of our lives, I have thought a lot about the unsustainability of humanity’s current crazy lifestyles and self-imposed anxiety and depression, whether or not any of us will survive. I’ve pretty much decided it doesn’t matter, and that it’s going to be someone else’s problem when I’m gone. They’ll either do what needs doing for themselves and their own progeny, or not. No skin off my teeth – or rather, the few teeth I’ve got left.

I will say that it’s always bugged me that the doomsayers always want to appeal to “But What About The Children!?” canard when trying to motivate people to do something about the mess. As if the people who pull the strings – and spend their lives polluting the planet, stealing the wealth, and otherwise trading gold on the several huge futures markets in human suffering – give a shit about anybody’s children (including their own). The sciencey-types keep telling me that the reproductive urge and tendency to have so many children they can’t be supported is some sort of ‘natural’ evolutionary drive controlled by complex macromolecules in our cell nucleuses that are “selfish” and want to take over the world. Since that’s never been true for me – my macromolecules are just physical biochemical pieces-parts, thanks, and don’t run my life – I have a hard time blaming them for anything except my physical nature and its unique peculiarities. And while humans are indeed incredibly short-sighted and stupid about many things, it doesn’t take much neural superglue to simply move to higher ground when the water rises. I mean, if you’re too dumb to do that much, you probably deserve to drown!

Three Self-Evident Truths:

ONE; Fantasy is always better than reality

TWO; Life is always better than death

THREE; Sex is a drug

Who dares to disagree?

There is one blog…one place…that consistently reassured me through the long, dark days of unemployment.  No politics…but I know where to find political blogs, lol.  

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

On Sunday morning I went into town to gas up my car.  While I was pondering the blue sky and the ridiculous price of gasoline, a man I know, a one-time client of mine, approached me and asked me if I had heard the bad news.  I hadn’t.  He told me that on Saturday, a friend of mine, another lawyer, a colleague in the public defender’s office, had died of a brain aneurism.  I was shocked.  My friend is about 25 years younger than I.  I told my former client that I hadn’t read about this in the paper or heard about it.  He said he was sure it was true, that he was sorry, and he called his sister on his cell phone.  Yes, she said, it was true.  Four people had called her to tell her the news.

I went home and called our mutual, public defender boss.  I think I woke her up.  She said my friend was as alive as alive could be, that nothing was the matter, but that she, too, had received several calls about his having died.  To put it mildly, reports of his demise were greatly exaggerated.  They were, in fact, false. I called him up.  He answered the phone.

It seems that on Friday he was playing in a golf tournament.  Through a bureaucratic error, no lawyer showed up to cover his cases in City Court, where he was supposed to be.  The judge said in words or substance that my friend wouldn’t be representing his clients, and he sent various people back to the jail or to home.  Apparently, the rumor started after that.

This morning I spoke again to the dead man on the phone.  He was fine.  He’d received phone calls for two days about what had happened to him.  He had visits from the police, the troopers and the deputies. His office had received numerous calls from his clients and friends.  The funeral home next door to his office had received more than a dozen inquiries about what the arrangements were.  A few people pulled into his driveway, some with tears streaming down their faces, to express their condolences.  A few friends of his had called the house from as far away as Florida.  A neighbor spoke to his father– his father was leaving a child’s birthday party at his home on Saturday– to express his condolences.

Today is Monday.  The rumor goes on, undeterred by the fact that the supposed dead guy is at his office, doing what he always does, and that the story is completely false.

Today I heard the story that his family was forced to pull the plug on him yesterday.

Meanwhile, he’s agreed to call a few reporters he knows to see if he can stop this before somebody on a playground tells his young boys how sorry they are that their dad died.

You are what you think. Not what you think you are, just what you think. That miracles spark behind your eyes is very much more “You” than the whole of your body.

Sit.

Close your eyes.

Breathe.

Observe.

If you truly see nothing, watch for a while. Try to imagine nothing watching you. But, don’t try hard. Look to the edge of nothing, is there an end to it? Look around. This is where you are. You are the only one here. Look long enough, and you will learn to see what you are looking around with.

Amazing, to me, that each could be the way I see my own, if I see clearly.

But, …. The way I see it is just the way I see it, see?

So…What do you see?

Kertis Engle 1993 No title, No copyright.

I’m always at choice.  It’s the only rule I can count on and I have come to accept with 42 years of reluctance.  At this point in my life I choose to ponder Iraq daily or even hourly because the country that I have been born into has done things to Iraq that deeply conflict with the laws that my soul knows and understands.  All aboard the Iraq War train.  I wish I was standing on the platform though like a citizen of France maybe or a citizen of any other country that didn’t invade Iraq in my lifetime, and just taking all this in from that distance.  I wish that lightening had not struck my train.

A friend of mine died yesterday, Valentines Day morning. She was at home surrounded by her sisters and held by her husband at the moment her body failed, as they sang to her and prayed. I sat in the hallway a few feet away and listened but did not impose myself to take up precious space at her bedside. She had pancreatic cancer that had remitted and recurred. Pain medication partially worked in the last few days, providing her hours or minutes of unconsciousness at a time but not in the final hour and a half of her life. Although unresponsive, she cried out strongly and often. Drowning finally ended her pain.

A couple of years ago she was diagnosed cancer and her prognosis was less than 5% chance of living beyond 6 months. Her treatment was first rate and with chemotherapy and surgery she went into complete remission. There wasn’t a trace of cancerous tissue in the organs that were removed, the therapy had been so successful, which is rare. However the treatment was so hard on her that she was left a shell of herself. We nearly lost her then and she almost succumbed to the trauma of the treatment. She had intense pride and it was clear she suffered greatly from seeing herself so feeble so she strictly limited her contact with anyone including old friends. Slowly she regained her health with many bumps along the way and only recently did we start seeing her back in her familiar settings. I saw her just before Thanksgiving as she made a point of coming to see me. She looked strong and had the old powerful and happy glint in her eye. She had always been a force to behold and she was back. I hugged her and told her how good she looked. I was happy to finally have her fully here among us again. Not more than a month later her diagnosis was changed again with no hope this time of survival. She went into bottomless depression and refused contact with anyone but her immediate family. Being a nurse, she even attempted push her family away and to find a facility to commit herself to that would oversee her care and allow her to deny her family the witness of the wrenching end she knew was coming. Of course that was far too much to demand of anyone and she was lovingly cared for at home by her family and hospice, but her passing has left wounds on those that were there. Hospice is a blessing, believe me.

I’m such a loser.

Such a total loser.

I’m starting to feel really good about it.