My Dying Diary #19

Here I am again!

Why is there never a cop around when you need one?
I know that no one has missed me, so I won't apologise for not being here for so long. I've had a busy summer, and I decided to sit down tonight and assess my life.

I'm an old bald fat guy, living under a death sentence.

No, wait, that was me a year ago. That has changed, or at least my perception has. If you knew me personally... which you can't, or maybe you already do, you would say that most of that description stands. Gotta leave the "fat" part out, though. Murleen and Erin have pretty well solved that for me... I'm in better shape, weight-wise, than I've been in since I got out of the military.

And I certainly feel better than I ever have, at least mentally. Physically, I'm sure that I felt better when I was 25, but I didn't have enough sense to appreciate it, so it was wasted.

So what are these girls doing to me? How are they working this miracle? Well, on the physical side: I get plenty of exercise and I don't eat very much and what I do eat is good for me. I don't take blood-pressure pills anymore, but I still take the Zantac, and I probably will have to do that for the rest of my life.

And I actually have muscles that you can see!

But the physical side of it is the smaller part... the psychological part is fantastic! I like myself, and I feel like a useful part of society. I like most other people, I don't just see them as people who have things that I want... money, cars, status, women. And most other people like me, too. I have no real reason to be a jerk anymore.

Yeah, I used to be a jerk. Not something that I'm proud of. A jerk that made enough money to buy this house, this life.

But in order to enjoy this house, this life, I had to see how meaningless it was... how temporary, how trivial... the pursuit of filthy lucre is demeaning, and I was demeaned. Mostly by myself.

I knew all of this, intellectually. There was no emotional connotation to it, though. It was just there, like so much other stuff was. Like my Caddy, my wife, my daughter. An intellectual posession, but not one that I understood or believed in.

Now, I understand.

Now, I believe.

A one-in-a-hundred chance does funny things to a man, when it's his very life on the line.

That wheel with those ninety-nine "DIE!" and that single solitary "LIVE!" on it is still spinning. Where it lands is dependent on things that I have no control over: my genetic makeup, the skill of the doctors that treated me, the purity of the medicines they used... The thing that I do control... is how I live from now until the wheel stops spinning... and how I feel about the days, months or years that I have left.

And I have that control firmly in my iron hand. I'm neither optimistic nor pessimistic. I'm realistic.

That one-in-a-hundred chance... is that really right? Maybe I have a one-in-ten chance. Maybe it's really fifty-fifty! What can I do to better my chances?

This is what I asked the doc last week, when he again pronounced me cancer-free. "What can I do?" He said, "Prayer seems to work sometimes." I snorted, and he said, "And... a positive outlook certainly won't hurt your chances, either..." and I agree with him 100% on that one.

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