Morbid, or Magical Thinking? And a Poem.
Toby thinks that some of my thought trains are morbid, but I don't.
Sometimes I think about how many people would come to my funeral if it were held now, and I find that rather comforting. I am honored to count many fine human beings as my friends.
I also like to think consoling thoughts about various deaths. Like, my worst fear of death is to live long enough to be a demented and incontinent shade, tied into a nursing home wheelchair, full of confusion and fear. So it follows that if I turn up with, say, liver cancer (ptoo ptoo ptoo), or a swiftly moving brain tumor - not too soon, but before the nursing home - I might actually feel okay about that. Or I imagine that I might.
Also, I like to contemplate easy suicides. You know, painless and mess-free. I can't work out how you make it okay for your family, though. And of course, the only reason I would do it was if I were terminally ill anyway, because I love life, but when, exactly, do you, before you are too weak and sick to pull it off? My favorite is to slip off the end of the Nantucket ferry at night in the winter, tanked up on gin and Oxycontin; the whole thing probably takes less than an hour and you're food for fishes, never to be found.
Toby dislikes talk of death and illness because he has actually been ill unto death and has no romance with it. I think I might be doing some magical thinking - you know, that if I consider all the possibilities, my thoughts alone will keep them away.
ETA: Oh, I forgot the reason I thought of this post in the first place. Here it is: once you have children, the worst thing in the world would be for them to die. So whenever it's time for me to die, I'll be glad that I get to go before Tristan and Honora, because to see one of them die or to live in a world in which she or he had died would be unbearable. So in that imaginary place where you make deals with god, that's what I'm thinking: I promise to go with a smile on my face as long as Tristan and Honora live.
And now, because April is poetry month, here is poem about death by May Swenson.
Death
great smoothener
maker of order
arrester unraveler sifted and changer
death great hoarder
student stranger drifter traveler
flyer and nester all caught at your border
death
great halter
blackener and frightener
reducer and dissolver
seizer and welder of younger with elder
waker with sleeper
death great keeper
of all that must alter
death
great heightener
leaper evolver
great smoothener
great whitener
Sometimes I think about how many people would come to my funeral if it were held now, and I find that rather comforting. I am honored to count many fine human beings as my friends.
I also like to think consoling thoughts about various deaths. Like, my worst fear of death is to live long enough to be a demented and incontinent shade, tied into a nursing home wheelchair, full of confusion and fear. So it follows that if I turn up with, say, liver cancer (ptoo ptoo ptoo), or a swiftly moving brain tumor - not too soon, but before the nursing home - I might actually feel okay about that. Or I imagine that I might.
Also, I like to contemplate easy suicides. You know, painless and mess-free. I can't work out how you make it okay for your family, though. And of course, the only reason I would do it was if I were terminally ill anyway, because I love life, but when, exactly, do you, before you are too weak and sick to pull it off? My favorite is to slip off the end of the Nantucket ferry at night in the winter, tanked up on gin and Oxycontin; the whole thing probably takes less than an hour and you're food for fishes, never to be found.
Toby dislikes talk of death and illness because he has actually been ill unto death and has no romance with it. I think I might be doing some magical thinking - you know, that if I consider all the possibilities, my thoughts alone will keep them away.
ETA: Oh, I forgot the reason I thought of this post in the first place. Here it is: once you have children, the worst thing in the world would be for them to die. So whenever it's time for me to die, I'll be glad that I get to go before Tristan and Honora, because to see one of them die or to live in a world in which she or he had died would be unbearable. So in that imaginary place where you make deals with god, that's what I'm thinking: I promise to go with a smile on my face as long as Tristan and Honora live.
And now, because April is poetry month, here is poem about death by May Swenson.
Death
great smoothener
maker of order
arrester unraveler sifted and changer
death great hoarder
student stranger drifter traveler
flyer and nester all caught at your border
death
great halter
blackener and frightener
reducer and dissolver
seizer and welder of younger with elder
waker with sleeper
death great keeper
of all that must alter
death
great heightener
leaper evolver
great smoothener
great whitener