The Beginning of the
End…
…A Journey of Death
By
Ann Wilmer-Lasky
The
days I've left may be precious few. I do not know their number, only that they
are fewer than I had reckoned on. (Oops! I ended that sentence with a
preposition.) You know something? I don't care. I'm dying - I can end a
sentence whatever way I want to.
OK!
So I'm not sick-in-bed-dying (there but for the grace of the gods go I) But I
have a bad heart, and I am sorely feeling my mortality, especially after a
particularly nasty bout with congestive heart failure and a less than happy
prognosis of a severely damaged heart muscle.
This
blog is not so much about the rigors of death, as it is about what I
need-want-aim to do before I die and what I can't possibly accomplish, given my
history, circumstances and pathology.
As
hope no longer springs eternal for me, I am forced to face that I may never see
another… What? Holiday? (Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years?)
Birthday? (mine, my husband's, my kid's, their kid's, their kid's kid's?) The
friends I've left behind? Yet I do not feel a compulsion to engage in the
frenzied activity necessary to enjoy each and several one last time. Perhaps
I'm merely weary of the struggle that has become my life. Perhaps I've
developed a somewhat jaded, fatalistic view of things. But then I always did
see that proverbial glass as half empty, and I'm a life long subscriber to
Murphy's Law and its main corollary: "Whatever can go wrong will go wrong
and at the worst possible moment."
Those
moments now being anything, anytime as my resources to deal are now severely
limited and my prospects are not the greatest, if not non-existent.
So
much for my complaints - what does my reader gain from my rantings? Perhaps
this:
DO IT NOW!
BEFORE IT'S NEVER!
(an admonition I have preached to
myself and yet ignored for more years than I care to recollect. Remember - there
was always tomorrow. That at some point becomes no longer so.
Remember,
too, these words from the popular hymn: "You who have dreams, if you act,
they will come true. Would you turn your dreams into a fear, it's up to
you."
Forget
about the 'paying your dues' right of passage. You were born into this world.
You have already paid enough. You are entitled to whatever success you can
garner.
My
poem of the moment follows. Shades of Wild Bill - the first in a
new collection which will be published at or before my death, depending on how
long I have left.
Shades of Wild Bill
By Ann
Wilmer-Lasky
The acrid scent of death
Hangs heavy on the air.
Soaring vultures spiral
Warily overhead.
A gray, yet cloudless, sky
Drifts hapless west to east.
Summer cools to the touch
Of harsher autumn winds.
I sit and wait, aware
The aces and the eights
I hold bode never well,
But no dark figure looms,
Nor pistol cocked and primed,
No ante has been raised
Against my brazen bluff.
I fold the hand I'm dealt,
Face down the damning cards
Upon the table strewn
With my now straitened life.
I shall not die today.
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