I really didn’t think I’d last this long. Don’t ask me why, or why not; I just didn’t. But here I am, still plugging away, still writing, still making plans for those better days when we’re all vaccinated and allowed to go outside and play again.
For a while there, I wasn’t sure it was going to happen in my lifetime, whatever that would be. But I should have known better. We were all put on this earth to accomplish a certain number of things and I am now so far behind, I can never die. And as Old Eternal told me so many years ago, back when I was a scared kid thinking the Cuban Missile Crisis was going to end with the world blowing up, nothing will get us out of what we have to do tomorrow.*
But then, I never thought I’d ever get cancer, either, and even when I did, it was like a non-event. They caught it so early, I didn’t need chemo or radiation and I figured that was the end of the matter. I never once gave a thought to the possibility it would come back, not when they had caught it so early. Who knew? Not me.
Well, as I’ve said many times here and elsewhere, I never felt like I was going to die. I’ve never felt like I was in a serious physical decline. I’ve never even been in pain––not the kind of pain that calls for anything more than ibuprofen or naprosyn. Recovering from chemo took some time but I felt like I was recovering, not waning or fading. At most, I feel the effects of getting older––and getting older isn’t dying. Unless, of course, you choose to see it that way, and if you do––jeez, get frickin’ counselling, because you really need it.
And now, I’m starting another year.** Oddly, the Diagnosis of Doom came at the end of 2014. ”Two years, or it could be less” has become six years and counting. There’s nothing to indicate that New Year’s Eve 2021 won’t be seven years and counting, but there’s no guarantee it will be, either. But there never were any guarantees even when I didn’t have cancer––only my mother’s assurance that nothing’s going to get me out of work tomorrow. I simply can’t imagine not being alive, even though I’ve actually been dead.
So I guess it’s odd for me to say I didn’t think I’d last this long. But living happens in an unending Now. Tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, next decade, none of them has come into being, I can’t live there, nobody can. As I said, when I got the Diagnosis of Doom, I abdicated from the future. I read about things that were due to happen or to be finished by 2020 and thought to myself, Well, I don’t have to care about that. 2020 was too far away to see with the naked eye. And then before I knew it, 2020 was Now.
Life is funny. Life is a habitual practical joker with an endless supply of whoopee cushions.***
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*For those who haven’t heard this story: I grew up in Massachusetts during the Cold War. McCarthyism had run its course but there was a lingering fear of war-mongering Communists, complete with TV footage of Nikita Kruschev banging his shoe on a desk, supposedly promising to bury us, an idiom that lost its original meaning in translation. ‘We will bury you’ actually meant ‘We’ll outlast you’––Communism would be at Democracy’s funeral. What the US heard was, ‘We’re gonna kill you.’ Turns out both sides were wrong. Life is funny. In any case, the Cuban Missile Crisis (Google it––this footnote is long enough) looked like it would finally tip us over into global thermonuclear war and the end of the world. I was already pretty high-strung due to the chaos of my early life, which had taught me that most grown-ups weren’t reliable and the more powerful they were, the more likely it was that they’d do all the wrong things. One night, my mother was putting me to bed and I asked her if this was the end of the world. She told me we weren’t going to get out of having to get up and go to work and school in the morning. “Nothing’s ever that easy, Putschka. Now fuggedaboudit and go to sleep.” It’s the one thing she was always right about. No matter what happens, it won’t get us out of work, or school, or a dental appointment, or a deadline. Deal with it.
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**Granted, this year was pretty difficult, not just for me but for everyone, everywhere. It’s going to be a while before life returns to anything approaching what we think of as normal and even then, it won’t be quite the same. Life is funny.
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***Made you look!
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