Constantly Living Uncertainty

On the insistence of the body

I used to write funny. I have an old blog to prove it, at least those few entries that were genuinely hilarious to the six or eight friends who read them. I also used to be way more outer directed, blogging about national catastrophes, global issues, the fate of the planet. Somehow, I could hold both hilarity and tragedy in my head as I typed.

Then I entered my 50s, that magical decade of the many phases of, say, menopause; the panic of Covid; the (unending) transparent criminal absurdity of Trump; the near-precipitous decline and recovery of many aging parents; the unexpected death of a longtime lover; the sudden dissolution of old friendships. What happened?

The greatest shock of this decade was the new insistence of the body. Beyond my menopause was the frozen shoulder, the two-week suffering through the symptoms of the global pandemic, the recurring sciatica (or is it stenosis?), the sprained ankles, the appearance of polyps in the colon,…it just doesn’t end, and it never will, not now. This is life forever.

And who am I kidding? It’s always been life, for everyone, for all time. How in the name of holy vaccinations did I just now come to realize that our macro bodies are at perpetual war with the micro world?

How did it just now occur to me, in the last year of my 50^th decade, given global wars and global warming, the murder of migrants and children, rampant diseases like AIDS, and, I mean really knowing about all that, how did I just now really realize in my body that we are constantly living in this crazy nebulous place of, what the fuck and when? It seems most everyone I know and love has lately revealed that they are living with a condition which could, probably, eventually kill them, if an errant bus doesn’t get them first. To take two examples, I have my mysterious brain thing (the symptom is the numb left eye, MRI March 14); and my theater friend HD exclaimed over lunch at the West Bank Café last Saturday, “So, my prostate cancer…did I tell you that? Oh! I have cancer!” And we had to laugh.

Constantly Living Uncertainty

Our introductions to disease
an ultrarare sarcoma
late diagnosis melanoma
two types of diabetes

Those many swords of Damocles:
pulmonary fibrosis
multiple sclerosis
life-threatening allergies;

Cancer histories, predisposed:
colon bladder prostate breast
esophageal and the rest
the diagnoses presupposed.

How is it, knowing all of this,
How is it nous continuons?
To meet each day with coffee cups
Face the downs to find the ups
Fix the leaking kitchen drain
Wash the car despite the rain?

Dorothy Parker I ain’t, but sometimes only playing at verse gets me through. Verse, and Ella and Louis; or trying my hand at collage again; helping dear friends through grief; enduring yet a fourth colonoscopy in 15 years; weeping past control over the whole fucking world—feeling as deeply as I can, pushing through it, to see what comes out the other side.

Here’s to uncertainty and unforeseeable change as our new normal, that was ever normal and never new. Will work on getting funny again. I so want to cheer you. In the meantime, don’t die.

Love,

Miss O’