Monday, May 2, 2011

We don't physically live in an ideal world

Most of us have been conditioned into one religion or philosophy or another worldwide. Some might call this superstition or believing in an imaginary friend. However, sometimes living with the horror of the loss of a loved one or friend, especially if it was a difficult transition is emotionally difficult to deal with. The unfairness of how life appears to treat your friend or loved one isn't okay. There is no emotional evenness to be found.

I remember waiting several years for my father to die of cancer in the mid 1980s and wishing I could find who did this to him so I could kill them. (This is a pretty typical emotional response by the way if you are a man). However, there was no one who gave him prostate cancer. And there was no one who stopped him from getting it treated promptly when he started urinating pink pee when it started to bleed 5 years before. None of us could get him to do enough tests soon enough that his life might have been saved. So, I was left wishing I could find who did this to him and kill them for killing my father. But, in the end it was my father who didn't like modern medicine. He had been raised to think that you only go to a hospital to fix a broken appendage or to die. This was how most people thought when my Dad grew up because medicine wasn't very good during the 1920s compared to now.

But dealing with my father dying was nothing compared to watching my mother pass away slowly from 1999 to 2008 from senile dementia(sometimes people clump all the variations now under Alzheimers) but the symptoms are somewhat different even though both are fatal diseases.

I always saw myself as someone who could deal with death much better than most people. However, I found that watching my mother slowly go from mentally being an adult to a child to a toddler to an infant to a coma, death rattle and then death was just too horrific even for me to process in any useful way. So, at this point I wish she had taken her own life and if I ever started down that road suicide would be my best option. My thought is to go up into the mountains by car or bus or train or plane and sit out on the veranda of my hotel room while it is snowing with a bottle of brandy until I was gone. I love the snow a lot. For a long time I thought about putting on my cross country skis and skiing off into a blizzard at night but then realized it would be pretty awful when someone found me in the spring half eaten by a coyote or raccoon or something. However, in the end I have a family and my family has to come first. After all, this is what I would do in an ideal situation where I was alone and realized that there was no more possible good or useful outcomes left for me. However, we don't live in an ideal world, do we? So we all have to fly by the seat of our pants and just do the best we can in every moment, don't we?

No comments: