Possibly Goodbye

I am going to die. And I am okay with that. My life has a good beginning, a challenging middle, and a satisfying end. I don’t have to lie about anything. I don’t fear going to hell. There is no hell. But there may well be something beyond. It is possible that I have lived before, and that I will possibly live again.

I know you may now be worried that I am talking from a position of depression and suicidal ideation. But I am not. If I am going to wake up dead in the morning, it will be from heart failure in my sleep. I have awakened in the wee hours of the past two days, shortly after 2 am. My chest was hurting on the left side, a thing it regularly does because of arthritis and muscle spasms in my rib cage due to my affinity for being a side-sleeper, sleeping on my left side. I also felt funny in the head, though I was not laughing. My arms both tingled. I had a pounding pain in my neck and in my left temple. I took my blood pressure monitor on Tuesday and found normal blood pressure, but a heartbeat of only 40 beats per minute. That, of course, is emergency-room territory. So, as advised during an early incident, I waited for the monitor to reset and took my blood pressure again. 40 a second time! My blood pressure was rising as I zoomed into panic mode. I took it twice more, one 70 beats per minute, but another 42 beats after that.

Before waking my wife, who had to get up for her school-teacher job by 6:30, I woke up my sensible 23-year-old daughter and repeated the monitor test. The first test was 42. My daughter pointed out that the monitor sleeve was so tight that my left arm turned purple. Readjusted it yielded 78. Still lower than normal for me, but much better than the tight-sleeve readings. By that time, my heart was thumping along real well and I felt much better overall. So, I went back to bed and lived a normal day after that. Exercising during the day helped a lot.

But at 2:30 am this morning, the whole thing was repeating itself. I was almost certain it was emergency-room time. I was reluctant to test my blood pressure. I exercised my arms and legs as vigorously as possible before carefully applying the monitor sleeve. 77 beats per minute. I was in the emergency room for reasons only in my imagination in early April, so that was a relief. I did not go back to sleep for fear of waking up dead. I ended up living another normal day today, though kinda groggy from lack of sleep.

The possibility remains that I may wake up in the morning to find that I have died in my sleep. Lady Death may be waiting to take me away. But I have this chance to say goodbye now before finding out if there is indeed an afterlife or not. For all who actually know me in person, I love you. Even those of you who will celebrate my passing. And for those of you who only know me by this blog and in my books, my writing will still be around for a bit. You can really get to know me better than most. No regrets. A good life in spite of the hard parts… or maybe because of overcoming the hard parts.