1:50 PM:
I clung to rational demission when the first lab results returned with elevated lymphocytes and monocytes. Post-splenectomy blood can look like that. It can look like that forever. When the diagnosis finally returned with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, I was not surprised, but I was unprepared.
While the blunt reality of the diagnosis did not feel unfair, the timing felt unjust. I was finally walking the path I’d struggled to find for decades. I was improving as a human being on all fronts, with deliberate and persistent efforts toward well-defined ends. Why now?
My time is uncertain. “My time.” Fuck. The very concept of your time is a plummet into an existential abyss. It is tempting to pharmacologically escape the entire notion of it, indefinitely, not in denial, but in avoidance. I am going to die. This is no longer an abstract idea of the distant future, but an imminent reality.
My family. Suzi and Adora will know life without me. The house will feel empty at first, but the emptiness will fill with time.
When I’m gone, which me will come to mind? Is that all we really leave behind, the conjuring of an image? I imagine they will remember different me’s at different times, contingent upon the circumstance of recollection. But if someone mentions my name, which image is reflexive? Is it the angry, destructive alcoholic? The passive-aggressive dispenser of silent treatment? The directly aggressive purveyor of destruction? The insecure and jealous reaper of reassurance? Which me do I wish to leave behind?
[This was a negative visualization practice intended to facilitate gratitude for the present and spark an urgency in living. How thankful would I be for things as they are right now if I were to be dispensed a terminal diagnosis? How differently would I live if I knew death were imminent? I would do well to return to this entry often. – September, 2020]
…. Making this entry is causing visceral distress. I do not want it to be real, and, in spite of my declarations of disbelief across the metaphysical spectrum, I still retain enough elements of magical thinking to be averse to the explicit expression of an idea, as if it will somehow shape the material world.
