Campfyre Stories

Every time things get particularly bad, I think about jumping in a car and driving until I run out of money or gas.  The more often it happens, the more sure I am that if it was actually an option, I would have already done it several times over.

I’d do it right now if it was available.

It’s not about physical distance.  Some of the things that I want to escape aren’t physically here, in this location, but they’re here, in this moment.  Even if not this very moment, waiting in the wings to resurface.

I can’t outrun my problems and I’m smart enough to not even want to try, but there’s something very appealing about removing everything about my life that makes it routine, at least for as long as the money/gas lasts.  Supposedly, my cruise will fill this longing, but the planning and waiting and anticipation all make it worse in the meantime.

I’m so stressed that my massage therapist suggested we try a new way to try to take the tension out of my shoulders.  It’s so bad he can’t do it with just his hands.  We’re going to try something called “cupping”, which sounds dirty, but isn’t.  My next massage will be four weeks from the last one (snowstorms every Tuesday night means canceling Wednesday appointments) and that is just far too long.  All my pain flares up after 3 weeks.

As much as I don’t mind getting a regular massage, this has to end.  My goal is in sight and I have a new plan (as opposed to no plan at all) and a bit of new clarity.  The thing is, when They talk about “the light at the end of the tunnel”, They fail to mention how far away it still is when you first see that dot in the distance.  It’s even farther in terms of time when you’re walking there.

I started writing a post the other day, but couldn’t quite get it right.  Part of it was that I wasn’t sure where I was going with the initial idea, part of it was the timing and, because of the timing, I’m waiting a few days to actually publish this.

January is a rough month for me.  Not only do you have the financial recovery from the winter holidays, but it’s cold and miserable and it’s the month my dad died.  Last year made things worse as the father of a close friend died at the beginning of February.  I think a lot about mortality in January, and even when it doesn’t come from me, it comes up a lot around me.

A few days ago I was chatting with a friend who said [because she's a vegan], “I’m gonna be hot when I’m 90.”  A (male) friend of ours overheard this statement and asked, “What about you, Fyre?  What are you gonna look like when you’re 90?”

I’m not sure what answer he was expecting, but I didn’t even have to think about it.  “I don’t intend to live to 90.”

There was no real reaction to that.  I’m not sure how anyone took it, but I know that it’s not a particularly common statement.  Most people, at least the people I talk to, WANT to live to be 100 and I can’t, for the life of me, figure out why.

Death is not one of the things I’m afraid of.  Dying isn’t even one of the things I’m afraid of.  I see it as simply the transition to the next adventure.  Maybe it’s that I have nothing really to lose right now, but I don’t see it as a scary thing, I see it as an opportunity to find out what (if anything) really is next.  Not that I would ever seek it out, but there’s a certain draw to actually experiencing something we can only speculate about.

But maybe it’s just me.

The things I’m actually afraid of are losing everyone I love and having to continue to live a relatively empty life without them.  I’m afraid of pain and spending years mired in it.  I’m afraid of losing my mind or my memories or my ability to function independently.  I’m afraid of no longer being able to communicate, whether that means losing the ability to speak or no longer being able to hold on to a thread of conversation.  In short, I’m a lot more afraid of getting and being old than I am of no longer being here.

So I thought about all of these things and I even started writing a post about it, but something wasn’t connecting.  I still felt like I was unusual in this thinking and kept coming back to wondering if there’s something wrong with me.  I used to joke that smokers all had latent suicidal tendencies.  Was this lack of fear of dying and death somehow a new manifestation of that?  And then I read this week’s Newsweek.

The title of the article is “They Myth of Aging Gracefully” and it’s an article about how getting old is no picnic and all the things that can (and probably will) go wrong.  Here’s an excerpt:

There is a 50–50 chance that anyone who survives to blow out 85 candles will endure years of significant mental or physical disability. The risk of Alzheimer’s disease doubles in every five-year period over 65. Furthermore, two thirds of Americans older than 85 are women, who usually become poorer as they age. Many won’t die at home, with the best care money can buy, as Sargent Shriver did in January, but in a Medicaid-funded nursing facility after their life savings have been exhausted. There is nothing wrong with hoping for a medical breakthrough to alleviate age-related diseases—especially Alzheimer’s—but hope is not a plan of action. Age-defying hope and hype do nothing to address either the overwhelming political issue of how to pay for Medicare and Social Security as the population ages or the many personal decisions about retirement and end-of-life medical care that each of us must make.

Now I’m a little more than halfway to “retirement age”, so this isn’t an imminent issue for me, but it’s something I think about.  My father was only 51 when he passed, but he was hard on his body and many years of cigarettes, drugs and hard living took their toll.  I think that people were more surprised at how young he was than that he died.  My friend’s father was 63 – a vegetarian, extremely fit, a perfect example of someone who did everything right.  My grandmother, who died this past fall, was pushing 80 and died trapped in her body, unable to communicate.  There are no guarantees in this world.  You simply don’t get to choose how you will age.

Which means that I don’t get to choose either.  However, I think that by not being afraid of death and dying, I’m ahead of the curve.  At least I won’t have to spend my last moments (whenever they come) dreading that transition and desperately clinging to life.  I hope (and intend) to meet death, whenever it comes for me, with open arms and a happy anticipation of closing one chapter to start another.

Before I’m 40, I will have a living will.  I will have discussed with my son what I don’t consider living anymore and I will make sure that he understands what I want.  I’m not an activist, but I strongly hope that physician-assisted suicide for the chronically ill or debilitated will be legal by the time I get to the age where I might start to be affected by qualifying problems.  If I get a say, even a minor one, then I say, let’s not live in pain and horror just to “live”.

So I have this “friend” and I label her in quotes because I’ve been questioning just how good a friend she is to me.  She’s a fair-weather friend, having told me that she “can’t handle” listening to me talk about things being bad.  She’s not very sympathetic, but expects sympathy for her own tragedies.  She pretty much made herself unavailable to me while my dad was dying and didn’t come out for the funeral.  She brags to me about how she gets what *I* wanted (and never even crossed her mind to desire) and then doesn’t understand why my reaction isn’t entirely “Go you!”  She refuses to admit that she might not know something or that she may have been wrong about something – ever.  She keeps calling me “kid”, despite the facts that 1) I have repeatedly told her not to call me that because it was my dad’s pet name for us kids, 2) I am OLDER than her and 3) I find it mildly insulting and patronizing.

In fact, she embodies a lot of things that I’ve changed about MYSELF.  The things I hated about my behaviors, like a know-it-all attitude, hypocrisy, a potential lack of compassion…  I’ve made life changes to fix the things I didn’t like about myself.  I’m still doing it regularly, it’s an ongoing process.  But I don’t think she even realizes that there might be room for improvement.  Everything negative is always someone else’s fault.

But I can get accustomed to all of those things.  I can move people into a fair-weather friend category or simply remember that this particular person can’t meet my needs in a friend or that I can’t rely on her to be part of my support network.  The problem is that she’s completely out of touch.

This isn’t about distance or even, really, unavailability, it’s about how she completely and utterly eschews technology.  She’s a technophobe who uses the internet out of necessity.  You simply cannot function without some knowledge of how technology works, but she can only perform the basic functions and uses probably fewer than 5 websites regularly.  She is not on Facebook.

Now there are people I know who aren’t on Facebook or who aren’t friends with me on Facebook and it doesn’t hinder conversations or developing a friendship, however, those people are folks I see regularly.  This friend of mine lives out of state and we talk on the phone every few weeks.  Because we don’t talk often, I don’t necessarily know to tell her everything.  There are a lot of things that I announce and talk to with people who are physically close to me and who I see regularly, but this friend, I don’t know what she does or doesn’t know, so I often fail to tell her things, things that she may deem important.

For example, my upcoming cruise.  *Everyone* knows about this cruise.  I’ve written about it, I’ve posted links on Facebook, I’ve talked to everyone (I think) about it.  Even my friend.  But when I leave in May, she won’t know that I’ve gone.  She won’t know if I’ve decided to take myself off the grid for the trip.  There’s part of me that already expects that she’ll call me on May 7th, while I’m on the pre-cruise Science in the City event, and then be upset that I wasn’t available.  Meanwhile, “friends” from high school and people I hardly talk to anymore will not only know where I am and what I’m doing, they will have already wished me well and sent me their addresses for postcards.

It’s not *just* that she’s not on Facebook.  I hope there never comes a day where my definition of friendship is so completely tied into any online service, but that she doesn’t retain information anyway.  She knows I’m going on a cruise.  She can’t (or won’t?) retain that the cruise is in May.  This is, honestly, where Facebook would be a useful tool for her.

This 21st century life brings with it a lot of changes to how things work.  I can’t really be surprised that it’s affecting (infecting?) interpersonal relationships as well.  I saw this coming years ago when cell phone minutes were still precious and hoarded.  I foresaw the potential for people to decline relationships with people on other cell phone networks.  I guess the reality of it isn’t quite that extreme, but it’s starting to lead me to a place where, if you’re not online, and I mean really online, then I don’t know if I can be friends with you…