Cobbled together moment by moment

17 December 2011 03:07 PM Categories: Quotidian existence

My mother didn’t think she’d live to see fifty. She was wrong, thank goodness, but I understand. I’m feeling it now, today in particular, the reach of death, of extinction, and it scares me this feeling, so solid and real, the apprehension of fate which most of us put out of our minds. We have to because no one can live with this thought constantly in mind, the threat – the guarantee – of death.

It’s a melancholy, lonely feeling. I’ve waited to start writing until the boy and his father were out of the house, on their way to a swimming lesson, and I find that everything feels contingent, time-bound, stuck and ever-changing all at once, and I hope this feeling isn’t some sort of premonition, some kind of weird knowledge of the end because the end is near. Like my mind is controlling it and I’ll lose everything, every little bit of it, because I am not good enough, or I am too dark inside. It must be taken away. Or I must be taken away.

The image I have is of a wrinkled, spotted hand reaching out of the mist to pull me into some other world or to pull what would be left of me, the spark, the bit of light. It isn’t frightening and it isn’t soothing and so much of it is obscured, just the hand, the reach, and then I’m gone.

Maybe this train of thought has come about because of my recent discussions with my mother about Christianity and the survival of our individuality after death, something she doesn't entirely buy (I'm still on the fence). Why are we so attached to the personal, the us of us, surviving our bodily death? What do we become? What is death like? Or will we ever know?

Maybe it has to do with the book I picked up last night, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed , three long stories dealing with women “all past their first youth” (is there such a thing as a second youth?) and their struggles with aging and wayward children and spouses. I first read this book in my early twenties when aging was a myth, a theory that I never thought I would test. I am happy to be absorbed in fiction, something outside of hard reality, and terrified by what it may inform me about the future (I have always gotten too much of my information on how to live and what to expect in life from fiction; perhaps I should pick some more uplifting authors).

Maybe it has to do with where my head has been lately – it’s guilt, plain and simple, deep and wide, dark and bottomless. It’s the needs of the body versus the needs of the mind and the soul and it’s bargains with myself about what I can handle and who I am. It’s the tangle of contradictions and prickly intimacies all jumbled up in my heart, wrapping around my mind. It’s murk and mist and mud.

I want to revel in the ambiguity of existence, the way we slam into ourselves in the middle of the night, the little inconsistencies. I want to be human, to forgive myself, to let my mistakes be. I want to be reckless and free, unafraid, standing outside looking at the stars, being in the moment, being there, instead of stuck inside my head thinking about the unknowable and ruminating on the inevitable, thinking that my inherent badness will cause my death or the destruction of those glints of joy that sometimes appear in my life, little shining moments of luck and beauty.

That’s why I was pulling weeds out front earlier today, enjoying being active and in the sun, totally absorbed in a mindless task. It's why I sat with the boy on the couch two hours ago, enjoying his closeness, the fleeting moments of his cuddly six-year-oldness. It will all change, it is changing now, and I want to be here for it all as long as I am here, me, with all my contradictions and flaws, putting the inevitable out of my mind.

Getting it onto the page -- onto the screen -- always clears my head. So now, back to life, cobbled together moment by moment, living as if it will never end.