Death

Death sells. 

It is powerful advertising for the drug companies, hospitals and funeral homes. Fear mongering pays. 

It is wrong to live worrying about death, because it is inevitable and dying began the day I was born. 

The truth is today is always the first day of the rest of my life. There is no other real option.

Who knows what came before birth, or what comes after death.

Perhaps I have already lived a thousand years, or have a million to go.

Making the best of what is, could be the best way to influence what will be.

And since I don't know if there will even be consciousness after death, let alone life, I need to just accept that what will be, will be.

Searching for the beauty and peace of each moment is, at least, possible. 

That is what I want to focus on.

It is happening

 

I have an apartment! I will move in July 27th, 2024!

Today I filled up the back of my Fit with boxes and decorative pillows.

It's just a start, but I can't really put anything else in the car until I know whether or not my granddaughter and I will be going to a band concert on the 24th. I need room for her and her lawn chair.

My nephew and family are going to help me, so he will tow a trailer filled with my meager amount of furniture and we will put more things in his and my sister's cars.

This is happening. I just have to wait until closer to the time to notify utilities on both ends and get my internet set up in the new apartment. I can do things like register to vote and change the address on my driver's license online.

It's been an agonizingly slow process, but I think I'm organized.

My octopus personality

I am supremely sensitive to almost everything!

The list of things I am allergic to, or that produce unwelcome results is very long.

It encompasses everything from the air I breathe to medicine, clothing,  foods and even the people around me.

A conversation with someone can keep me up all night. I pick up on other people's feelings and moods like an octopus in the ocean.

I have always had this sensitivity, even as a child. 

The quirk of an eyebrow, the slight change in a smile or voice, the darkening of the eyes. the body posture, let alone the actions of anyone and anything affects me.

I've tried to mediate all this with a small amount of success.

So . . . when my doctor tries to find a new blood pressure medicine, he is up against impossible odds. I have a hard time knowing when my symptoms are due to the medicine or the trauma of needing the medicine, or fear of the medicine's effect on me.

Add two or more problems (like high blood pressure and high blood glucose) and finding the results is factoring not adding.. It is not just one drug or two, but also all the others I take as well as my emotional reactions.

An octopus may have 8 tentacles reaching out, but I have a hundred feelers always ready and waiting.

Bad

 

I am entering a period of my life where parts of my body are failing. Not all and not completely yet, but enough that it has brought me to a realization.

Deep down inside I feel not like I am aging, or my health is failing, but that I am a bad person. A person who has failed to do the right things the right way and this is some kind of divine retribution.

I have not been the ideal human, eating only to live and exercising in precisely the right way. But I think it goes far deeper than that.

I simply do not consider myself worthy of the people around me and the life I have lived.

There are all sorts of reasons for that, but I am trying to put that in the past.

In the present I know, intellectually, that I am okay, maybe even more than okay.

It is emotionally, where I come up short.

And those feelings give me nightmares at night, sorrow and despair during the long hours of the day while filling me with regret overall. 

I am trying to be more realistic from this point on. I am probably no more and no less bad, or imperfect than most people. They are just more accepting of themselves.

I am not bad. I am just overly critical.

Traversing the unknown

 

As the, still unknown time, to move away comes closer I suffer from all sorts of thoughts and conditions.

Most of all I am feeling anxious. So many things to coordinate depending on how everything moves. Nothing is a given except the fact that I AM moving.

I am never sure whether my ailments begin in my head or my body, but either way it feels real.

I can only pack so much and still live here, which I must, so I am trying to compact what cannot be packed permanently for the move.

When I see my nephrologist on Thursday it will either ease my concern immensely or double my anxiety. I'm hoping for the best. My regular doctor complicated everything the past two weeks by neglecting to get an order through in time. Twice!

And to top everything off this heat wave is costing me a fortune in air conditioning. 

On the other hand, at least I have air conditioning!

Abortion

 

I had a bizarre thought while watching a horror show the other night.

What if by eliminating a woman's right to an abortion they are trying to guarantee the birth of the anti-christ, to remove any chance that it might be mistakenly aborted?

To the right people that might be worth any amount of human suffering. These people would not care if the living children were fed, or cared for.

They would only care about their own ambitions.

Heaven

 

My mother died thirty eight years ago today. She was too young, 58 years old, but she had eleven aneuryisms in the main aorta to her heart. She also had less than a third of a kidney left. By the time they realized it and rushed her to St. Louis via plane, she was too far gone to survive.

It is easy to think about dying when you are young and healthy, but a little more complicated as the time draws nearer.

I would love to believe that I will go to heaven and be reunited with everyone I love in a beautiful place, but my innermost soul tells me I will return to the dust I came from. I don't know if I will be conscious of my self, but I expect to blow with the wind over the prairies and rivers, the mountains and oceans with all the rest of creation. 

I hope it is the great feeling of belonging that I have yearned for all my life and never quite found. 

Being part of a whole so immense, so complicated and so eternal might actually be heaven.

Success

 

People within the same family may seem to have the same values and yet, their children turn out massively different.

I think everyone wants their loved ones to succeed and tries to give them the tools to do so.

The difference may be in the expectations.

I wanted my children to have the manners, the experiences, the curiosity and the desire to achieve whatever their hearts desired. I gave them the encouragement and the opportunities to play different sports, different musical instruments, and participate in those things they loved at school.

I tried never to set a goal, hoping they would reach as high as they wanted to .

Other people are more focused on protecting their children. They allow them to quit out of fear of failing. They don't encourage them to reach too high because they might not succeed. They enable them when their fears rise up and threaten them rather than urging them on.

So many of the goals for children under twenty are there to help them find out who they are. Not being the best at any of them, or even discovering they are terrible at some of them will not really affect their long term abilities, but not trying and giving it their all teaches them to fail. 

Learning to avoid failure is not the same thing as success.

Anchors away

 

If I could change one thing about me it would be that I could feel more tolerant of everyone.

I act like I feel that way, but inside, some people simply drive me crazy.

Not that I don't have foibles and weaknesses of my own, it's just that I can't seem to let go of some of the things others do that make no sense to me.

I try rationalizing and saying, "I do this and this and this and they aren't the wisest or best things to do."

It helps for a very very short time.

The strange thing is that I am very tolerant of most people's so-called faults. I even find some of them adorable in a funny sort of way, but there are a few people I guess I just expect more from.

And expectations are the anchors that bog me down.