Is There Something Lower Than the Underside of the Bottom of the Barrel?

If there is, that's where I am.  The oldest friend I have who's both female and on this side of the Atlantic has ovarian cancer.  Again.  For the third time.  Yeah, that means she's tough, since most women don't survive even one bout.  But she's also 61, and tired.  I don't know how much fight she has left.

I couldn't tell you the date or even the year, but I well remember the day when it dawned on me that at some point, I might have to do without her, might have to outlive her, but I was in my twenties when it happened.  Forty years ago, and it made my blood run cold.  It still does.  That was my first brush with mortality other than the vague general knowledge that old people stop being around.  The first time I got smacked in the face with what a bitch mortality really is.  Of course, there were later smacks, even harder - let me tell you, it's no picnic burying a son - but that one was my first.  I don't even really recall why I had that realization, just the affect it had on me.

I hate death.  Not my own.  I'm not frightened of dying.  Honestly, were it not for PT, I wouldn't mind too much.  But I hate death itself.  It shouldn't happen, not to anyone. (OK, OK, I'd make exceptions for Hitler or Jeffrey Dahmer and a few others of that ilk, and I'd personally dispatch anyone I saw brutalizing a child with nary a second thought, but you already know I'm not a good person, nor very consistent and logical.)  But overall, I don't think death is right.  Ever.  I don't think we were meant to die.  I'm not going to go all religious and talk about falls from grace, so don't panic.

But my sense of the world tells me that it's wrong, horribly wrong, that death occurs.  Not for the dying, but for those left behind.  Who knows if the dying/dead will find anything beyond -- no one that we know of has made that journey for longer than moments and returned to talk about it in any verifiable way.  I know what I believe about it, but I can't prove it the way I can prove that my eyes are green or that rain generally doesn't fall upwards.  So, that's not what I'm talking about.  I'm talking about the affect of death on the living.  It sucks.  (Or as my sister has pointed out, creates a partial vacuum, since Southern Ladies don't say "sucks.")

I truly believe that if our childbearing years occurred after we truly grasp what it is to be bereft of those we love, the species would have died out millennia ago.  Who would bring a child into the world knowing that that child would have to suffer the deprivations of being left behind?

Pooh, the master philosopher, said it best.  "If you live to be one hundred years old, I hope I live to be one hundred years old minus one day, so I never have to live a day without you."

Maybe it's not death I hate.
Maybe it's life I hate.

Burrowing my way back under the detritus beneath the bottom of my barrel.