I am leaving for Chicago tomorrow… I shall be out of touch for about a week…
The reason I am going to Chicago is because my mom is 87 and according to my
sisters, isn’t hanging well… Frankly, they are a bit surprised that my mom is still a
alive…so I am going for one last trip to see my mom…other siblings are coming into
town for this “event” and so I shall see them for the first time in years…
I suspect that my mom will pass away by start of the fall…and I am forced,
to confront that idea of mortality… both outside and inside… others die,
I have faced this concept before… but when one’s mom passes away,
mortality becomes front and center in one’s life…
intellectually, I know I will die… but it hasn’t reached me emotionally…
to feel it in one’s bones, as it were… still not there yet…
there is no part of this trip that fills me with anything other than sadness,
anguish and grief… and I can’t say it is all about my mom, because we have had
a very rocky relationship over the years… best said, a love/hate relationship lasting
over 60 years… but as I said, it has forced me to confront that which is
bound to happen to me, death… and I can’t escape that fate…
So, I must come to accept death, as it is… without all the rationalizations
and lies we use to deny or to take away death’s fear… we try religions
and lies about heaven and god and living forever… but the fact is,
we are, on some level, fear that there isn’t a god, that there isn’t a heaven
and we fear that this life, this one life is it…and we get no other possibilities and
that scares us in ways we can’t even understand…
Personally, as scary as it is, I like the idea of one life and one life only…
it forces us to become accountable, responsible for our lives… if my life is
a “failure” then I am to blame… but then again, I am not sure how the accounting
of life, how does setting one standard, one universal idea is acceptable for all…
we cannot take one idea of being a success and apply it to everyone…
there is no universally applied standard to use to rank or rate our lives…
depending on where you sit, you could rank my life as being a success or
a failure… I don’t see it as being either one… my goals has never been to
be rich or famous or powerful or have fancy titles… those trinkets were not
important to me… even as a child I didn’t see the point of those trinkets
of existence…
and now I go to Chicago to see my mom for the very last time…
and I get to think about the success and failure of one’s life…
Kropotkin