Waking Up to the Not-Death
I woke up about six weeks ago and realized I couldn’t keep doing things the way I was doing them or it would kill me.
Not literally, obviously. I could go on like this, miserable and stagnant, indefinitely. I wouldn’t call that living but it’s also not death.
Is being alive really enough to be called the opposite of death? Is it the not-death? If it is, I’d like off this ride, thank you very much.
In late July of this year, the chaotic hellmouth that has been 2021 opened wide and and swallowed my family whole.
Fine, that’s a little dramatic, but my father was having some difficulty breathing.
He ignored it for a bit, then finally went to the doctor and was promptly hospitalized for pretty severe congestive heart failure. He’s 68 and, yeah, that’s a fairly common thing to happen to white men in their late 60s, but it turned my world upside down.
For the first time in two decades my whole family — minus my dad, I suppose, who was in the hospital — was under one roof, dealing with a crisis.
A crisis during which only two people were allowed to be at the hospital at a time (which daughter will go sit in an uncomfortable hospital chair and listen to Mom and Dad bicker…
