Even before beginning this blog, I suppose, I had a set of unenunciated expectations for myself, and for what I thought I was going to do. The time frame of 730 days, from my 68th to my 70th birthdays, seemed a convenient framework on which to build a set of observations and reflections about my own mortality, and to confront, at least for myself, the surprising number of basic questions I still have, at what I shrink from terming an advanced age, about living, in and of itself.
It's been just two weeks, by my count, since my initial post, and I've managed already to fail to adhere to my own unvoiced regimen. Surely, I thought without really thinking, one entry per day, for two consecutive years, shouldn't be unmanageable, given the very real fact that, aside from weekly laundry, and putting out the recyclables twice a month, I have nothing in particular to do, and nowhere important to go.
But also, among that bag of mixed emotions I brought to this self-generated assignment, was what I find shameful to admit: the sad hope that, somehow, by putting myself through this discipline, successfully, I might evade the very end I thought I was so brazenly facing. Denial is much more clever than I thought, and seemingly much more pervasive, and expert at disguising itself.
Currently, I find myself amid other endings, some more foreseeable than others, but no less debilitating for their predictability. The production of 'Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street' has its final two performances this weekend --the sixth and seventh public performances we will have given, of what I consider to be the most challenging theatrical work with which I've ever been involved. I would like to hope that, in these final two shows, I'll finally be able to do my one solo song correctly; our one Sunday matinee was recorded, and of course I managed to stagger, at the very start of the music, and fluff some lyrics, which will be all I'll be able to see, I'm sure, when and if I watch the disc. In this regard, I feel like a mountaineer who, after rigorous training and considerable preparatory effort, has failed, by only a few yards, of reaching his goal, before it's time to turn around and go back to daily life again.
Our little red cat Buster, whom I've mordantly nicknamed Buster the Dead Cat for online identification, lingers on, in the final stages of fatal kidney failure. I keep simultaneously hoping and fearing I'll go upstairs and find him dead on the heavy, soft, blue and white and green afghan our friend Toni gave us for Christmas a few years ago. He seems to prefer sleeping on it, on our big bed. So far, though, each time I look into the room, he's still breathing, even though there's so little left of him now. I spend some time, usually twice a day, stroking his bony sides and prominent spine, and after a few moments, he starts to purr.
I've picked out a probable burial site, in the back yard, as near to our badly-situated redbud tree as I can manage to dig a deep enough hole to protect his remains from unsentimental scavengers. I know where the pick and spade are in the garage. I have a glass block, flat on one side and curved on the other, that I'm thinking of using as a grave marker for him. The blue silk brocade fabric I think I'll use as his shroud is currently still a child's jacket, being worn by a big teddy bear that's been banished to our 'guest room' -- hypothetical guests only being accommodated, if they can either sleep while levitated, or are prepared with their own hammocks. I've cleared out space in our freezer, leaving the top shelf empty, as Buster's temporary morgue, so John can also witness the interment. Although I am hydrating him with saline solution daily, I have stopped forcing him to eat -- I think it's stressful for him, to be wrapped in a big towel and have his jaws pried open, then to have cat food spooned onto his tongue, so he'll swallow what he doesn't manage to squeeze out of the side of his mouth. And to be frank, I find this stressful for myself as well -- although I also feel that, as the voluntary care giver, with the opposable thumbs so handy for prying cat jaws open, I am not entitled to complaint.
And it's impossible, simply impossible, to avoid seeing myself in what is proving to be a much more protracted death than I had anticipated. (Allowing myself to be guided by our vet's tacit assurances, that death by kidney failure is, for the animal, painless and simple, I'm half content and half resigned to let Buster meet his end here in the only real home he's ever known, amid shadows and scents that are familiar to him) I wonder if anyone will be with me, and whether or not I'll want to have my hand held, or if I'll prefer to have everyone in another room, when the mystery of death overtakes me.
At the risk of sounding laughably stupid, or of revealing a startling -- and unwarranted -- sense of my own superiority, I am ashamed of the fact that I'm going to die, just like Buster will. For some reason -- abetted by clever, relentless denial (op. cit.) -- perhaps buttressed by the now-mythic arrogance of the maligned 'boomer' mentality -- I have unknowingly supposed that I might be clever enough, somehow, to evade mortality. I'm probably misquoting again, but I remember Proust having said something to the effect that 'death is easy. People do it every day. Thinking about one's own death, however, is impossible.'
But, in the face of this conceptual imponderability, I find myself perversely determined to keep my eyes open for as long as possible, and to keep reporting back, as it were, from the front lines, about what this struggle (?) entails. Perhaps -- again nudged by denial, I realize -- I think that by putting up show of pathetic defiance, I'll trick death into seeing me as an inoffensive jester, unworthy of notice. Sort of the human equivalent of one of those bright clown fish that thrive amid the poisonous tentacles of blind sea anemones, I guess.
I am also sheltering the delusion of being able to clean up my own mess, before I leave the studio, as it were -- even though the thought of merely excavating our basement fills me with despair. And what I consider to be an especially ironic, or pathetic layer of this despair, is the hope I see embodied in so much of what I've accumulated with such apparent indiscretion. Instead of striking me as burdens to be sloughed off, many of the oddments I've rescued from one gutter or another still provoke a vision of what I thought they might become. I'm as unwilling, at some level, to part with these battered and, in many cases, unidentifiable scraps, as I am to find Buster dead, either on the bed or under it -- Buster isn't an especially old cat, after all, and didn't I make a tacit pact, with each of these objects I've adopted, to give them a safe and respectable place to reside, so different from what they would have expected, had they been left to be swept up and dumped in a landfill?
(And actually, I do have an incomplete blog entry, still simmering, I guess you'd say, but which I can't post until what I think are the missing elements are put into place. So I haven't spent the entire time, between my last post and what I guess will be my next one, watching old movies on TCM. I seem, simply enough, to want to isolate myself from my own life experience, as from everything else I avoid on a more or less daily basis)
Every once in a while, I do something. Every once in a while, I start something. Mostly, though, I sit in a kind of painful indecision, daydreaming about painting this or assembling that, or concocting something else -- all while sprawled on our hand-me-down sofa in the under-lit den. I wonder, without having whatever you would call it -- nerve? Insensitivity? Vulgarity? -- to ask, how people much older than I manage to get out of bed every day, dress themselves, and go out into the world. For the time being, at least, even my seemingly limitless capacity for spitefulness doesn't seem adequate to get me past my feelings of existential anxiety and horror. Although I openly question the value of such a belated effort, I've started again, with another therapist, who has said that, together, we can find away around or through my present impasse. In a way, if I could view it from enough distance, I might even find my own behavior amusing -- a man in virtually perfect health, with more than enough time and resources to do the things he says he's always dreamed out, who is nonetheless both consumed with the dread of wasting time, and yet frozen in an indecision fueled by despair.
So. Back in the practical world. I have laundry to continue washing and drying. I'll pack my gym bag, and drag my passive corpus the eight miles to the Sumit YMCA, and work up a sweat, walking two miles while staying in the same geographic location. Later, and holding my breath, I'll set out for Madison, and the weekly therapy session -- the one offering a key to my figurative handcuffs. No one is shooting directly at me, as I often quip. I'm ambulatory, as is my usual reply to questions of how I am. I guess that, for today, these factors, and maybe even my own potentially magnificent failures, will have to suffice.
© Walter Zimmerman (though, why?) 2014
No comments:
Post a Comment