11th July 2016

As I mentioned in my series of dying thoughts post, I have decided to put a few of my dysfunctional entries online, as separate posts. They'll all be about my thoughts on dying so, you know, a little depressing. I was aiming to get them all up within a week. Best intentions, eh?

When I wrote this I was still in Wellington hospital and on a high morphine dose. Again, this post is cheesy. But I do not apologise this time.

11^th July 2016

I have been struck with a sudden, maybe even overwhelming, desire not to die. Overwhelming is probably a bit much. I am not hysterical. I am not even sobbing. I am merely weeping from one eye. I don’t know what weeping from one eye is called. Sadness, perhaps?

I don’t have a bucket list. A few people, including medical professionals, have asked me about my list. Even to compose a list. My bucket list was to live a long life with Michael. Before all this, the disease, the relapses, I’d become comfortable with myself. And I’d come to quite like us as a couple. We were growing up, maturing, and our life in Nelson was going to help people, both now people and future people. I have no doubt that Mike will continue to do good once I am gone. He is the best man I know. But I am really quite sad that I will not be there to watch him achieve this greatness. His wife is going to die, and I’m not going to be there to help him when that happens. That is the hardest part for me. I love that man so much. I am going to miss him even though I won’t actually be around to experience the loss.

I am lucky, so lucky, to feel this strongly about someone. But I am sad, and both eyes are weeping now. 

10th July 2016

As I mentioned in my series of dying thoughts post, I have decided to put a few of my dysfunctional entries online, as separate posts. They'll all be about my thoughts on dying so, you know, a little depressing. I was aiming to get them all up within a week. Best intentions, eh?

I must confess I don't really like this entry. It is too 'woe is me'. Other than the last paragraph, I don't really feel like this anymore. This entry was written in hospital, when I was rather emotional and in an awful lot of pain. I am sorry it is so cheesy.  

10^th July 2016

Better people than I have died. Younger people too. Better younger people. There was a teenager in the UK and when he became terminal he began a blog championing socialist ideas. The entire time he knew he was dying, yet he was trying to improve the world. I’m fifteen years older and I haven’t even started. And I like his writing more than my own.

I have a couple of regrets. The first is not really up to me. I regret that I cannot live longer, watch my husband age and flourish, see my sister get married [I did actually get to do this], enjoy future nieces and nephews. That is all out of my control though. These things aren’t going to happen so I ought not to pine about them. My twenties have been good to me. I have enjoyed them. My husband, the time I have had with him; well it is a good thing we married young. Many people don’t get to experience what I have. I am aware of this and I do appreciate my own life. Even now. Especially now.

The second regret is something I had a bit more say in. I regret that I haven’t helped the world. Since I was a little girl, I wanted to save the world. My plans were grandiose, unachievable, some may say. As I got older, everything I experienced I justified as research for how I could make the best impact. And, of course, I was just about to start my master plan, even if the plan lacked specific details. Yes, I am certain that I was just about to start. But I never did start. I came into this world, mucked around for thirty-one years, and will leave without making the slightest social mark. One could say that my life was wasted.

I don’t know how many of these thoughts are actually caused by my narcissistic personality. Or maybe it is a generation Y thing. I know that when I was initially diagnosed and there was minimal chance of dying, I got a little egotistical about making myself great, famous, a champion for humanity. And for animals too. So maybe, this regret of not saving the world just stems from my ego. For anyone interested, my master plan was to volunteer twenty hours a week (I hadn’t chosen a specific organisation) whilst writing a novel as socially poignant as Steinbeck. I had even drafted a plot pyramid. But the novel will never be written, and was probably rubbish anyhow.

But I think my advice to those out there contemplating the epic novel, the overseas adventure, the big job move; is just do it. I know it isn’t original advice. Nike got there first. But seriously, we shouldn’t let life get us. What are we waiting for? Most of the time we have nothing to lose. 

9th July 2016

As I mentioned in my series of dying thoughts post, I have decided to put a few of my dysfunctional entries online, as separate posts. They'll all be about my thoughts on dying so, you know, a little depressing. I am aiming to get them all up within the week.

So that was February. In March there was a garbled entry, trembling hand writing, where I’m ‘running out of time’. April, I was ‘worried about my body’. I seemed to be less morbid in May, but wrote nothing of any substance. These entries aren't worth publishing. They were mainly just free writing; writing to keep the words away from innocent bystanders. June, well we discussed June in a previous post. So now we jump forward to July, where events become a little more concrete. Although I must warn you, I was on quite a bit of morphine at the time.

9^th July 2016

Today was the first full day of knowing that I will die. Soon. I will die soon. Everybody, I hope, is aware that someday they will die. But really, they are aware that humans die; rarely do they think of their own mortality. And rightfully so. It would be all to consuming to worry about such things. Today was my first official day of dying. Death has infiltrated my mind over the past year, but even I hoped (without ever really expecting) that dying wouldn’t start for a while yet. Like, it wouldn’t start until next year. But it’s not next year. It is now. 

I'm dying now.

27th Feb 2016

As I mentioned in my series of dying thoughts post, I have decided to put a few of my dysfunctional entries online, as separate posts. They'll all be about my thoughts on dying so, you know, a little morbid. I am aiming to get them all up within the week.

It was around February when I began assessing songs on their funeral suitability. I even made a playlist. I obviously have grand narcissistic visions as to its length. What? Four days is too long? Hmm, ok I will reassess it then. But February seems to be when I realised that things weren’t going so well, even though I did not go into marrow failure until March. So I will start with what I wrote in February and move forward chronologically.

27^th Feb 2016

I feel like talking. I don’t know who to talk to. Mike and I are alone but he is too unwell to talk. Or to listen. He is trying his hardest not to be unwell, and I am trying my hardest not to be frustrated by him being unwell. But he does have the beginnings of a cold and I ought to let him, on this quiet Saturday evening, just rest and submit to being ill. He has done so much for me. I have become selfish.

Yet, when my head decides it wishes to talk, it is rather difficult to stop it. The thoughts swirl around my skull, before pushing through my brain and into my mouth. Sometimes an audible a sigh can keep them inside, sometimes a gulp, even a little headshake. Unfortunately, this usually gives the appearance that I am having a minor stroke, and the techniques never work. The thoughts always seep towards my tongue’s tip. They always come out eventually. Today, I will try and substitute an audience with my little black book. Death is on my mind. Not death as in the actual dying part, the part where you can’t walk or talk or bathe yourself, that only crosses my mind every so often, no, it is the pre-dying part that occupies most of my brain. And these pre-dying thoughts, well, they are punctured by flashes of a future where I do not exist. I am not dying yet, nor pre-dying, however the likelihood that both these stages will happen this year is high. High enough to make me want to talk about it. But no one wishes to talk of death. The ‘How are you?’ questions cannot be answered with truth. The enquirers do not want to know the truth. I do not want to know the truth. 

Katherine Mansfield sums up my thoughts quite well in a telegram:

“At the moment, too, I can’t write letters. I haven't the time. I’m late now for the Sphere & it’s a difficult job to keep all these things going. I write to nobody. Please forgive this, understand it & don't get anxious & don't telegraph unless you have to! I have such a horror of telegrams that ask me how I am!! I always want to reply dead. It’s the only reply. What, in Heaven's name, can one answer?”

http://www.katherinemansfieldsociety.org/13-june-1922

A series of dying thoughts

I declared honesty in my last post, so, with honesty in mind, I must say that I expect this entry to be a bit shit. There are many loose pages, bound within my little black book, that are yet to be immortalised by the internet. Then there are more in my dysfunctional book. I would like to immortalise them, although there is probably a perfectly valid explanation for why I haven’t yet done so. Namely, that they are a bit shit. But I shall press on anyhow, with the hope that despite my fragmentary thought processes, there will be a little cohesiveness.

If we start with the present; well, I still have a million little blurs rushing about my head. I imagine my mind to be a little like one of Kafka’s institutions; indistinct grey blobs scurrying around with authority but achieving nothing of importance. Just confusion. Do I write the post of now or do I write the loose pages? I can’t even make that decision. Hopefully it will make itself. That is the joy of writing, isn’t it?

Oh so rhetorical! This is what I am at the moment, a bunch of unsolvable questions. I want answers, I want clarity, I want control, but all these things are impossible. I hate to admit it but given I am a millennial, I do have a tendency to Google everything. I know the internet to be fallible, but there has to be someone out there who has been in my situation, who has thought the same thoughts, who has had the same questions. I find reading the experiences of others helpful, not how they overcame the problem, solutions vary so much between individuals, but more that we share the same problems. It is a relief to know that you are not alone. As I mentioned in my last post, I am yet to find such a report. Most blogs I discover are too positive. Maybe I am not looking hard enough. I don’t know. But I do know that some days I struggle with the idea that I have no future, and seeing as my grand plans were to save the world, I best give a little meaning to the short time period I have left. I am humouring myself, I know. As much as I love to imagine that this blog is helping strangers, it isn’t. If anybody should happen to stumble across it, it’ll probably just leave them bewildered. But I believe Camus. I believe that in order to continue with the absurdity that is life, I have to try to make it better for others. And how do I do that? How, when my master plans required decades, do I condense them into a couple of months? By writing? By voting? By traveling, giving my money to remote communities, corrupting them with my Western ways? Really all I am doing is what I want, feeling guilty about it, and then attempting to justify my behaviour.

A blurry taste of August....

It may surprise you when I say that I rarely make a decision with purely selfish intentions. It is difficult to be selfish. But there are days when I want it to be all about me. Days when I frown at the world, clenched teeth, a furrowed brow. I am not angry at my situation, more at the bloated folly of society.  I myself feel bloated. All the time. So here are a series of selfish posts about my thoughts on dying. Posts that let me continue my delusion of aiding others. The majority were penned whilst I was an inpatient, and I have decided to post each entry separately over the next week. A new post should appear every couple of days. Most are super short and super emotional; do not fear! August was an amazing month for me. But you'll hear about that later.