The winter of life

It’s weird how at times I get these incredible insights about my life, how it’s OK that I’m in the final days of my nearly 57 years.  That this is the natural, organic conclusion of my life.  I’ve lived long enough.  And although it’s sad in a way, death is also not to be feared, but anticipated.  I am witnessing myself in my end days.   My decline and degenerative process are so apparent to me.  I have no appetite and have lost the ability to digest food, so I am incredibly weak. My bladder and bowels have stopped working,  I pee once or twice a day.  There is no escape even in sleep;  I have stopped sleeping.  I drift off a couple times a night into very shallow, dream-filled sleep, and lie awake many hours, pondering the depths to which I’ve sunk and how very unfair it all is.  I keep thinking, “What did I do to deserve this?”    Such a random thing,  a non-prescription drug I took for too long has robbed me of my being, dehydrating my entire body, including my brain.  It is known to cause dementia, by drying the brain out and destroying a major neurotransmitter.

Yet the man I’ve shared my home with for over two years now fails to see how far down I’ve sunk into total dysfunction.    I want to scream at my oblivious boyfriend,  “Look at me!  Look at me!  Do I look anything like the woman I used to be?!”   I’ve become a stranger to myself.  I used to be a functioning human being.   To have lost that is a horror beyond description.  To look in the mirror and see these vacant eyes looking back, the spark that used to be there,  permanently gone.  I can’t believe he just takes for granted these momentous changes in my being and never shows any compassion or empathy for me.

Death is as sacred as birth, it comes to me.   I need to leave the pro-choice chatroom I’ve been frequenting, or at least go there less.  It frequently degrades into a truly obscene kind of place. I want to spend more time here, writing in these final days as I approach the realisation that death is actually sacred.  I want as peaceful a transition as possible.  I already have my m3thod.  If I were an animal, a loving owner would surely euthanize me.

I just went and got my cat back from the shelter. I’d taken her there Friday as  I’m unable to deal with her sensitive stomach and special needs;  she vomits all the time.  I can no longer cope with the litter box.    But I kept being haunted by the image of her shedding tears in the cage, feeling abandoned by her person of 13 years.   She, like me, has no quality of life.  She has feline herpesvirus, which means she has very little energy due to depressed immune system.  Eat, sleep, throw up.   Not much of a life.  And who knows how long til she found a new person, and how  hard it would be for her to be in a new home, away from the one she’s always had.   I think it would be kinder to put her down than to make her live in a cage for a week or two, possibly be shipped to a big city, or eventually be adopted by a new person.