Over the last couple of weeks, I have had small reminders that I am not immortal. My neck is plagued by arthritis pain near enough to my spinal cord that it put me in the hospital once by messing up an EKG and making the ER doctor think I was having a heart attack. (Multiple EKGs were messed up; it took a week to sort out the real cause.) This week, my neck has been cracking as if it were a knuckle that I would never intentionally crack for long-term arthritis sufferers’ reasons. I keep thinking my head might separate from the rest of my body after an egregious, unwanted cracking. Or, more realistically, it might pop and leave me paralyzed. a
My chest has also been hurting in an area on the left side, right above my heart. This, too, has sent me to the doctor’s office thinking of a possible heart attack. It is arthritis attacking my ribcage. It causes rapid muscle spasms that feel like my heart fibrillating and beating far faster than a living heart should. So, I have vast experience with false myocardial infarctions.
But this week, on top of the same old false symptoms, I have been getting heart rate readings on my blood pressure monitor that are far below normal. Even more concerning, I have passed out several times, followed by snapping awake again, possibly my body reacting to dangerously low heart rates. I haven’t been to the doctor yet about that, a thing that may put me in the hospital again for something that is not really a heart problem again. But it could also presage a death by heart failure.
One day, coming up, I may wake up dead already from heart failure as I slept.
I am not worried about dying. I don’t believe in life after death. But I do believe the entire universe is alive, aware, and actively ready to reabsorb me and repurpose that which makes me up. The problems I worry about associated with death are the effects I leave behind me, economic, emotional, and generational. And I have left behind me lots of writing that will tell my loved ones all the things they don’t really want to know about me.
The time for proof of mortality is near. But even if it does not occur this week, I am not afraid of facing it. I feel fully connected to the universe and fulfilled in my little patch of existence. It is good to know there are some things I can choose and can control about how I face it. I will try to get back home to the farm in Iowa to choose the place where it happens, the place where both of my parents died, and all four of my grandparents have died, and four of my uncles and aunts have died. Heck, there are more finished lives in my family than continuing lives. Of course, that’s true for everyone who ever lived.
Catch a Falling Star 