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The Last Day

No one ever believes they’ll only have today as their last day of life on the planet. Instead, while clearly knowing we don’t live forever, it’s a concept that is only that: a concept. Until of course, it isn’t!

FROM WAR TO WONDER AND BACK

I heard a TV host (Nicole Wallace) when describing Brad Paisley’s recent trip to Ukraine to meet with President Zelenskyy, as reflective, meaningful, inspiring.  Of course! But was it life-changing? Possibly, although I don’t recall that phrase being used by either one of them.

While I have had some, what for me seemed like life-threatening situations, I have no concept of a war environment having never been in one. Some experiences really do boggle the mind and are simply lost in translation. I wonder if Paisley felt that? I wonder if he felt his own existence at risk, his very life but was unable to articulate it. Being in a war torn country could possibly do that to a person.

THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE

As I continue to have seriously challenging health issues, it’s as close as I’ve come to catching the whiff of my own “last days,” though not a solitary one. What would the threat of that be like? I’m not sure any of us can know without the reality of that potential staring us in the face with certitude. And even then, it could be only a potential.

Occasionally I like to play a game with myself of “what would I do on my last day?” How would I behave, how would I spend it, what would I do in that time? And with whom? I never get very far with this odd speculation or fantasy because, of course, I assume it is not in truth my last day! Instead I always assume there’s more…including more time to plan my last day!

THE BREAKDOWN

But as I approach at least a narrowing of the time I have left on the planet, I think more and more and more of less and less of this all-the-time-in-the-world assumption. How can I not at age 71 and with a chronic health condition? And yet, I continue to assume I’ll have at least several days—three days, four days, a week or more, months, maybe even years, continuing the pattern of no real last day.

No matter how much I know our bodies have an expiration date, because I believe I am essentially spirit I trust I’ll continue on after leaving this incarnation, this body. And yet I operate all too often as if I have the luxury of limitless time in this one. It is naïveté and denial at its ultimate. 

Oddly, this foolish denial is even in the face of my body’s continuing breakdown as evidence to the contrary, that this earth experience is finite. It boggles the mind! As perverse as it sounds, I almost envy people who have some disease, usually cancer, who have been diagnosed as “terminal.” At least there’s an endpoint that’s suggested, though still subject to change when one is defined by a medical professional as to a specific last day.

THE SLOW LEAK

The vagueness of body breakdown through some disease process that is not listed as terminal feels worse, although having said that, how would I know? An ongoing deterioration still leaves far too much emotional room for death’s postponement! It’s as if one is being toyed with by God, the universe, or fate! It also implies a control that a person doesn’t really have. 

I had an uncle whom I’d always admired. He seemed strong in spirit, tough in self-reliance and sturdy in mind. He was my colon cancer link. He’d had his colon resectioned (without colostomy) about 20 or more years before he actually did die. 

HOW DARE HE

And then he took his own life! He was 93, only a month shy of his 94th birthday. Even though it was years ago, to this day I remain shocked, and I think mad at him. While he had always seemed so practical, earthbound, and reverent in his own way, the decision he’d made to call it quits remains a mystery to me. And while we’ve all known people who give up (or give in) it is a different proposition to “just surrender to the inevitable” by taking matters into their own hands. It feels like robbery.

For my part, I just continue on, tinkering with corrective surgeries one after another to fix or repair something that has seriously gone awry. Ironically I think I agree to these surgeries not just for quality of life reasons but for “quantity!” God help me! At one point I even told my surgeon “no more surgeries” only to “of course” rescind my own edict! I want more of life and from it. So often, even when I’m exhausted from it all I know deep I’m not done.

WONDER

It sounds greedy but so what. I’ll postpone my last day perpetually, and even assuming the date of my last day on earth is preordained, I’ll do my part to keep consciously choosing life one way or another — up until it’s obvious I don’t have a choice that is mine to make. Surrendering really is the ultimate spiritual exercise. We always think we have control and influence over so much in our lives and rarely is that true. It’s more like we participate in the act of living and hopefully, responsibly so. Yet there comes a time when the slow leak of life accelerates and there’s nothing left but to surrender. 

In the end my uncle was wrong about his ending. Yes, I’ll judge him though still with love and affection. While he’d left home at age 14, lived a long, productive and successful life through grabbing the reins of self-reliance, his life wasn’t really his to take. 

SPECULATION

Which takes me back to Brad Paisley, Zelenskyy and anyone catching the whiff of their human termination date, regardless of cause or circumstance. Paisley’s face did look quite pensive when Wallace was interviewing him. And it had the kind of look that wasn’t just about democracy either. It’s as if he lit on the fragrance of not just the concept of a potential but rather that concreteness of choice and surrender, potentially turning on a dime. And while this is pure speculation on my part, he witnessed through the prism of not just war but that of principle. It just happened to be in the context of war.

THE ODDITY OF BEING BORN HUMAN

We humans are a quirky lot. All our bravado and brains, ingenuity and fortitude, in the end our last day is not ours to determine though some people feel otherwise. For me, even in my darkest hours at times—and I’ve had plenty of them—there seems to be a fierce and stubborn reliance on living. I’m guessing that if I ever have any sense of a last day, I’ll be frustrated as hell.

But I could be wrong. That’s the thing: living always leaves room for wonder!

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Learning Is As Learning Does

Good God! What a year, what a lifetime. In so many ways I’ve been incredibly blessed throughout. Trouble in the Middle East and what feels at times like a narrow escape out of it. Surviving my dysfunctional family of origin with reasonable wit, occasional depression, and believe-it-or-not optimism (which at times seems like a friggin curse!) A dozen moves in childhood that left me feeling nestless!

Fast Forward To Now

So here we are, here I am, entering 2023 with a bang or a whimper. I can’t decide what mood to settle on, instead lurching uncontrollably back and forth between the two states.

I won’t lie; I could but what would be the point?! I’ve always been too transparent even to myself. I’ve had a hard road these last few years with health issues, surgeries, occasional “ah ha” moments followed by self-doubt and dare-I-say again, optimism! At heart, I am a forager for the puzzle. And the lesson!

Why won’t it leave me alone; that pesky perverted instinct or drive to unmortify things, look for the lessons regardless of emotional states I inhabit, contained within an insatiable hunger to learn? I insist on looking for what I need to know. If I can’t find it initially, I wait (sometimes patiently, sometimes not.) Occasionally, I make it up, inventing a lesson, however small, until a greater insight arrives. I’m just that restless, driven.

What on earth do other people do with their heads if not trying to figure out what things are for, from personal and world events to good and bad people, triumphs or tragedies alike? What their meaning is to them subjectively or not, that deeper meaning? Growth is everything, why else would we be here?

Everybody Loves Raymond

I’ve been mainlining Everybody Loves Raymond recently for comic relief; you know, that sitcom of years ago that replays on one of the streaming channels. There’s so much wisdom besides insatiable humor, in most of the episodes. One I recently saw had the little girl Ally asking her dad (Raymond) why does God send us to earth? Why do we come here? Let that hang in the air for a second.

Of course Raymond, being the perpetually struggling simpleton that he is, actually has the most amazing and uncanny ways of learning himself, whether it’s through his wife, Deborah, or flat out events that demand he address issues in some way by their very existence, all by himself like a big boy. It seems he’s helpless on his own, but with the help of others (ding, ding, ding) including his family, which is dysfunctional as any in America, serves as the grist for helping him along to new insights, one way or the other.

When he goes to Deborah, the insight seems simple but profound. She tells him God just wants us to be with other people, to not be alone. Implied in that of course is the very earth school that is serving Raymond through Deborah in the whole crazy clan of his family. The metaphor is apt in the comedy and also apt for everyone’s individual life contained therein, subtle and obvious both.

All In This Together

Everything I see in the world around me is about growth, death, regeneration, and furthering more growth (evolution perhaps??) but all from learning some nugget, a component atom in the larger molecular structure of the small and big Self and the community it lives in. From a plant as a simple expression to holocaust survivors or the war in Ukraine; from the bottom of the food chain to the top. But always, always within the context of others.

My Own Classroom

Having been blessed to know a Survivor, and write about his life, Bennet mirrored that from his experience. One of my favorite speakers is Esther Perel. Both of her parents survived the Holocaust, which, of course was only but brilliantly the ginormous earth curriculum that they “grew up out of.” 

Perel describes other survivor friends of her parents, after creating new lives post-liberation, chatting about their concentration camp experience minus the drama of the tragedy but within its milieu. Instead, their intuition was to glean their own sustenance from it to forge new individual selves, transcending it, knowing somehow, some way they are greater than the sum of its parts, as a tribe which by definition includes “together.”

An Uncanny Therapy

In the very act of asking one another things like ‘whatever happened to so-and-so’ from camp ‘such-and-such’, their experiences become unmortified from the larger tragedy itself. While their experiences were gigantically large, I have my own Rosalie lessons as paltry as they seem in comparison, but included in an environment of people parts (as well as body parts.)

Fast Forward the Physical

My body challenges have surely demanded I pay attention to and learn what I need to know to grow emotionally, psychologically, but especially spiritually. It is my curriculum if you will, but too often have resisted. How many times have I spouted this little mantra while actually living from that belief and heavy identification of mySelf as “the body,” and therefore separate from others. My belief in “others as teachers” is heavily challenged.

For whatever reason, I am faced with more bodily breakdown, decay and surgeries, and cannot help but intuit this remains an opportunity for learning something I need to see but have heretofore denied.

The Excitement of the Drama 

It doesn’t need to be so hard, but we—I— insist on having tragedy even in the face of incredible gifts, because we—I—misunderstand the purpose and value of things including tragedy. Tragedy as well as comedy is a learning device. Just ask Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy can surely attest to. It (the war) may be couched in an oversized drama, but his drive to transcend it is clear, palpable. It is preceded by comedy, his earlier life’s work, but for whatever reason, a different “energy field” of tragedy has been required for him.

And so in an odd way, like Ally, Raymond, Zelenskyy, Holocaust survivors—pick a category—my seeming tragedy of yet more body breakdown is no tragedy at all. Nor is it a comedy either. It simply serves as a learning device, a vehicle for communication. Instead, it strikes me as I am greater than the sum of any of my individualized body parts. If I believe I am spirit as the real me—I must view “me” through the whole of those folks I know and love…and sometimes even those I don’t. Whenever I ultimately do leave the planet, I’m not hauling this body thing along with me. Rather, I will be in a field of spirit—not woo woo, mind you—but from that field of love which is the only true “me” there can be.

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The Madman of Moscow


I’m living in the brutality of the now. Not the brutality of the then. Not the brutality of decades or centuries past but now, today, each day the same as if it was a then. But it’s not; it’s now. 

It’s Putin’s brutality at this point. He pushes death like a street corner drug dealer, with Russian customer troops looking for their next big fix, a high they can’t get enough of.

BLOODLUST

“More, more” the killing machines clamor, as if a homing device needed a target before it can be satisfied. In my mind I imagine Vladimir with pointed teeth, growling, blood dripping from snarled lips. Never enough is the cartoon bubble above his head; never enough.

Behind his image in my mind’s eye stands Adolph, the first Hitler, egging Vladimir on. It is an energy force field seeking victims for an end goal. And the goal is destruction, anguished torturous and vile.

BOTTOMLESS PIT

For what? To dominate, to conquer, to satisfy a thirst which can never be satisfied? We watch in horror as the bodies pile up, twisted and torn, unrecognizable to kin and countrymen alike. 

“Never again” echoes in the smoke faintly, mocking the death of now. It is perpetually ongoing, redundant but not made obsolete. Forever and Ever, Amen screech the priests of death. It looks to be an in perpetuity, infinite sort of hunger for death, dismemberment, savagery sort of thing. A bottomless pit!

And again we watch. Helpless? Hardly! The West could do more to stop the madness but for the time being, Putin is having his way with us even as he allegedly loses. He has thrown us down and had his way with us! We are cowed by evil. It is far more frightening than the evil itself in its own way.

TO SAVE A NATION

Zelensky, our only hope for reclaiming our conscience, begs, pleads but Biden and his National Security Council is still too timid. Instead, their presumed rationale for not further provoking the Madman of Moscow is to prevent WWIII. Instead they sacrifice America’s and the Wests’ real power, that of truth and democracy itself in the shadow of Chamberlain.

Consequently, the senselessness continues along with the relentless tears of men and women in the now; The in perpetuity of madmen and presidents who misunderstand the real stakes for humanity ad infinitum.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if the US helps save Ukraine through providing massive weapons systems designed to defend its burgeoning democracy. Yet, we lose our own while Biden and the Dems are distracted, as Republican White Supremacy Extremists march on in our own backyard.

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