The Beginning of the End...

Last year, when Hubby had a health problem sufficient to send him to the hospital and be kept overnight, my Beautiful Daughter was quite upset when she arrived at Emergency to hold our hands.

"Well, it's S C A R Y !" she exclaimed.

Hubby and I just looked at her. I tried to be gentle as I explained to her that she should start steeling herself against these occurrences.

"We're over 50," I said. "This sort of thing is only going to happen with more frequency. Right now, all they take is a little bit of blood. But in the years to come, they'll take lots of stuff! They'll be giving us tests that are more and more involved. Eventually, they'll begin harvesting organs, maybe even transplanting sections of us from one place to another. One day, so much of us will have been removed that we won't be coming home again. So, better not to wear yourself out emotionally on this occasion, dearie. You've got YEARS of this sort of thing coming!"

Daughter did not find this thought very comforting at all, and said so. Hubby and I shrugged.

We've had elderly parents. Heck, I lived with my Grandparents. Once someone reaches sixty, every time they go to the hospital, they start worrying that it'll be their final visit, as if they can hear the funerary bells tolling already! In the case of my Grandparents, they took about twenty-five years to reach that point, even though they worried about it all the time. In fact, for the last three years of their lives, every time they so much as sneezed, they expressed the fear that the END was upon them.

So I got kind of ... jaded? ... about hospital visits, about the potential for losing loved ones. Having been mostly reared by said Grandparents, I've pretty well figured out that when the grim reaper does finally turn up, it'll be a relief, if only from all the worrying...

I'm not exactly BLASE about death, but I do accept it as being a natural part of life. Don't get me wrong - I MOURN. My mother passed away last year, but I've been mourning the loss of my relationship with her for years. Started when I was 5 years old, in fact, when family moved me away from her - they call it kidnapping nowadays. I've spent most of my life missing my mother.

I still mourn for pets that died 30 years ago or more. I mourn my first marriage. I mourn events that didn't even happen to me, or even to anyone I know! I got mourning nailed.

But death, for me, holds no particular menace. I don't believe there's anything after, you see. So it makes me determined to enjoy life now. To spend as much time as I can with those I love now. I'm holding nothing back, and I hope I never will. Hospitals hold no particular horrors for me, I actually see them as nice, safe places to be when we're sick. And I love hospital food... Okay, yes, I am an oddball...

And on the 16th of this month I'm having a hysterectomy. At last, I'll be free of that particular nasty scourge! I'm rejoicing over this particular removal. Don't know if I'll be as happy the next time they go to take out one of my bits... who knows what will break down first.

Stephen Leackock, in "How to Live to be 200" talks about people who have "the health habit." He describes their frantic exercise regimes, their fanatical diets, their refusal to be content. Sound familiar?

"And after all their fuss," he sums up, "they presently incur some simple old-fashioned illness and die like anybody else."

Well, I could have avoided this particular surgery, but the other options don't appeal to me at all. In the years to come, I may actually miss whatever they're going to lift out of me. But I know that, barring accidents, I've got quite a few years left in me, so I refuse to worry about the road ahead, or even the sudden stop at the end of it.

Not dead yet! Better luck next time....