October 4, 2004

Waiting?

"Some people aren't afraid to die," says Matt.
"I'm not afraid to die," I answer.

It's true. It's something I've thought about and I'm not afraid to die. It's different than wanting to die, I'm certainly not wanting to die any time soon. But I've come to the belief that my time is my time.

Matt and I get on this topic, as we do many, as a tangent. Something said to something said about something else and an oh by the way.

My cousin Donald, who is really my granddad's cousin (after his favorite cousin and friend, Addison, my granddad, passed away he said I should take his place as his favorite cousin) said that our Aunt Carrie died around 99. Some of the "old" family lived to be well over a hundred. But they never were feeble. They pretty much got around and did chores and stayed active and then one day expired. Work on Friday, pray on Sunday, die on Tuesday. Not a bad formula.

When I was a teenager I thought about death in a sort of adolescent fascination that included lots of poets -- from John Donne to Matthew Arnold to Sylvia Plath -- and other writers -- Albert Camus and Ernest Hemingway. "Lady Lazarus" and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" were more than just English class assignments.

And Edgar Allen Poe! The man obsessed with the deaths of beautiful young women. Cried the Raven, "Nevermore!" And all that jazz.

Once I got to college, I thought a lot less about death and whole lot about what was happening in the here and now: parties, homework, late night runs to Steak N' Shake for the chocolate shake with the cookie on the side (how much did you love 24 hour restaurants in college?).

It wasn't until after I was diagnosed with RA that I thought about my own mortality. First, my body was failing me, big time, in swift, hard strokes to my knees, ankles, wrists and elbows. I was tired. I was poked week after week with injections -- at the time gold shots -- in the hopes my body would be re-jump started. This got me thinking about dying. Not that I wanted to, but how fast and far the body can fall.

Then I read the mortality rates for RA patients. 20% less life than the average person. Not exactly something you would want to do cartwheels over, if you could still do cartwheels.

Okay, as Shakespeare said in one of his plays, here's the rub. You can focus on the 20% less part and make every day miserable thinking about how your not going to live as long as everyone else.

Or, you can make up your mind that quality is really much more important than quantity and that if you have something important to do, you better the heck do it now.

In my case, I decided to write. Writing, to most folks, is this thing that seems like a cool thing to do. You put words on paper and people read them and you put down more and they read more. Only the words have to be put together in a way that makes them interesting or beautiful or profound or stark… basically, a really hard thing to do. Then, there's the rejection. Writers get a heck of a lot more rejection than acceptance.

One literary magazine I know of gets 40,000 submissions a year and accepts about 1% of them.
So why write if you've got a short leash on life and the profession is full of rejection?

For me, it's about the process. It's about figuring out what and how to say something. It's about imagination and worlds. It just about the doing it part. The acceptance and rejections are just two of many results of writing.

And, while it may frustrate me or be difficult to say exactly what I want to say it is also the one thing that makes me the most happy in the world. It makes me present in the moment. I'm defined by what I do, not by the fact that I have RA. I am not my disease.

I don't know why people don't try to do what they really want to do. Does it take learning your life could be cut short by 20% to get motivated? Maybe. But there are no guarantees about anything. Not in the world before RA, not after after, not ever.

So what are we waiting for?

Posted by renee | Filed under:

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