A few days ago was the fifteenth anniversary of this blog – 14 May 2006.
I wanted to finish a blog entry from September 2019 – so a bit more than a year and a half ago – a fairly amazing late-summer experience of Vienna, Barcelona, Sitges, and life, and excitement, and death, and ending.
It's a draft, about 2,000 words, of something that probably should have been 5-6,000... if I'd gotten focused, written what I was thinking, the awareness – and the excitement, the passion. It was clearly a time of coming alive again – and it has echoed through the months since then: a sense of being full of energy and eros, of seeing how wonderful and exciting things were – or, are – and how big death is, but also how much it has become easy for me to face....
A shame I didn't really finish the draft; at some point I'll post the fragments, especially my eerie closing, which I'm very proud of. That ending may or may not resonate with friends or readers, but for me it is one of those pieces of writing, in stories or articles or blog entries over the last fifty years or so, where I think: yes, that is wonderful, and I am aware that I am done with desire or need or loneliness or disappointment, because I have written that.
•••
But today has a couple of things in it: one is that wish, and its disappointment; and this desire to mark the anniversary, even if some days late...
But now, after two patients this morning, four scheduled this afternoon, a sense of busyness and the usual concerns about writing the book (which should be more important than anything in my world, but is also something that just may never happen) – I drink a smoothie and some tea, I finish washing the dishes, I look at the dim weather, and...
am overwhelmed by a wave of weakness.
That's happened periodically over the past three or four years. And now it echoes a strange event from five weeks ago – a very, very minor event that recalled, that suggested, a stroke: I was standing in the front hallway in the evening after various activities, including showing a movie online to the gay book group, and my eyesight, abruptly and without fanfare, shifted sideways, angled down, split – for probably less than twenty seconds –
I thought, yes, I've seen this before. It was a part of what happened in 2009, when I had a stroke. This time it isn't the same, it's much smaller: feels like a warning –
I go and lie down, though I'm not as ill afterwards as I was in 2009. As I say, a minor event.
I didn't even go the doctor for several days, but after telling a friend or two about it, and seeing their faces and their irritation, I thought, yeah, I'd better tell someone. The GP, then referred to the stroke unit, an afternoon of tests and discussion – no MRI... they add blood thinners back in to my meds, treat it as real but not (yet) a problem.
It was odd... I talk about death and ending all the time, this shouldn't be much of a surprise, or a shock. And it's not – the possibilities around such a tiny experience are not unfamiliar, I can already see them, I just have to turn my head and look.
But it does, of course, leave me a little disoriented, a little off balance...
•••
Intermittent odd feelings and weaknesses since that day; a more enforced series of walks with M. and with M. (two different names, indistinguishable when you have only the first letter!), but they're hard to do, not only because of inertia and overweight-ness, but a real sense of that post-stroke weakness, fortunately in a very attenuated form.
•••
And so today, this wave of completely incapacitating weakness: I sit at the desk, feet up on its corner, typing away – it's a kind of work but I'm pushing myself to do it: if I keep being reminded of mortality, of the fact that, one of these times, everything will start to end for me – then at least I can write, I can talk about it...
•••
A bit of relief at the possibility of being done with the university, with marking and administration.
A bit of concern about all my analysands: there are too many, it's true, and can I be sure they'll all find their ways forward, if I vanish from the conversation? In most cases yes, but....
And the weakness washing through me, making almost everything impossible, but in a relaxed and sort of wonderful way: letting myself wash into the universe....
•••
Not being sure what this is: not being sure what anything is.
Fortunately, with my post-everything education, and openness to not knowing: that is, in itself, kind of a relief.
I should go lie down... do I cancel my two o'clock?... perhaps the only decision now is the one over the next minute, which is to lie down and not be concerned...
•••
There is something absolutely at the existential center of my life about illness, anxiety, and the resonance of this not-doing-ness. Fortunately I've gotten rather good at paying attention to it.
And to now.....