December 26, 2003 It's 11:10 p.m., I'm one hour into a 5 hour flight back to Pennsylvania on a Friday night red eye. Grandmommy is not well. She's 97 and while she's strong as an ox and sharp as a tack, she's going downhill rather rapidly since this weekend. How she caught pneumonia is anyone's guess, but her heart has been affected, as it is weak, and she now has congestive heart failure. While weak and nauseous, she is quickly losing interest in remaining on this earth much longer. She's coming to terms with her age and her mortality and is ready to let go and move on, finally seeing her Henry who passed decades before her. I can't sleep.

I tried, but these seats are so damned uncomfortable and my back is achy, I feel a bit nauseous myself and the turbulence is enough to make my anxiety flare up. I know intellectually that being nervous, worrying or having anxiety are hopeless and pointless, but it's much easier to say it than to experience it emotionally. So, I decided to get up, turn on my handy laptop and do some writing.

I feel like crying and did shed a few tears since earlier in the day after talking to dad about grandmommy, then mom, then grandmommy herself, then Danielle and finally decided to fly home to see her while she's still breathing. You know, taking people for granted is so easy. Appreciating people in your life is challenging at times. I think I do need to make a decision to move. Perhaps I will move back East. Perhaps it's time for me to be closer to my family. Perhaps it would be easier to do the kind of work I want to do from the East Coast. Perhaps I do not know what kind of work I want to do. Perhaps I should go to Florida and write and read.

Imagine, grandmommy has been alive on this planet for over half a century more than me. Nearly 2 times my lifetime. I wonder if I would be ready to go after all those years. What kind of legacy would I leave behind? What would 60 more years of life for me bring to the world? What am I contributing now? How does grandmommy assess her own life? What does she see when she looks back? How does she see it? What emotions does it conjure up for her? Happiness? Regret? Sorrow? Things left undone? A sense of satisfaction in doing what she feels she was meant to do? Loneliness? Anger? What does one do when one is 97 and death is imminent? No more fooling, life is truly at an end, the heart and organs are ready to retire, taking the mind with it, down into the unknown depths of the afterlife. Is there afterlife? Do we live on? Do we reunite with those having passed before us? Do we feel, taste, touch, smell, see in another form? What about thought? What kind of thought exists?

I can only choke back tears as these thoughts cross my mind. At 36 I feel that I have a whole lifetime ahead of me. Yet, at the same time, 36 feels so incredibly old. I can't even remember what it was like to be young, or even in my early 20's, when I really did have a whole lifetime ahead of me. Yet, even if I live to be 100, it's like a fleeting moment in the universe. Not even a blink compared to the billions of years of planetary existence. My life is so short and so meaningless in the scope of things. How can I possibly keep up momentum to keep on going, to keep on striving for, for what? What am I striving for? What do I do with my waking moments? How do I bring meaning into the overall meaningless of this fleeting existence? Is there a purpose, or do we create purpose in order to prevent our own depression and suicide? What keeps us from suicide? A basic instinct of survival? Or a more incipient and embedded fear of the unknown? Perhaps even more deeply embedded within our minds is a greater knowledge of the universe and our place in it? Or perhaps there again, it's the ego trying to make meaning out of meaninglessness.

I love my grandmother. At least I think what I feel is love. Do I know my grandmother? I don't know. I visit with her for such fleeting moments in already a fleeting existence, that perhaps I really don't know her. Perhaps her deeper self remains hidden behind the polite grandmother/granddaughter facade that is so poignantly hygienic and antiseptic. We are on our best behaviors in each other's presence, not really seeing the dirt and the darkness that lurks beneath the surface.

So, back to the question that I began with - coming to terms with one's life and death. At 36, I don't encounter this as an imminent question, yet, it lurks nearby in my thoughts everyday. Surrounded by death and news of death in every part of the world, we are blanketed with it. For me, I connect to it personally when I am riding my bike and cars whiz by me 3 feet away. I connect to it personally when I'm driving at 75 miles per hour on a busy freeway and cars come very close to me. I connect to it personally when I feel pain in my body and wonder if cancer is silently growing within my cells, soon to unveil itself and say checkmate to me. I connect to it when I'm flying at 35,000 feet above the earth in a huge vacuum of metal and plastic and suddenly the plane shakes with turbulence.

Somehow, my moments of freedom come from the bottle - wine, beer, or vodka. They give me moments of freedom, no anxiety, no fear, no worries, no regrets, no pain. Perhaps that is why I drink. Last night, on Christmas day, we enjoyed a wonderful meal and I offered champagne. Malcolm chose not to drink at all. I wondered to myself what it must be like not to drink at all. I have been drinking now for so many years, I have come to rely on that corkscrew, the pop, the pour and the sip. It doesn't matter what it is - wine, champagne, mostly, but vodka and beer occasionally. I perhaps have convinced myself that because it's wine, I'm fine, I'm not dependent. Yet, I know, deep down, that I am. I have $5 on the seat to my right, ready to buy a glass of red wine from the flight attendant. Is it because I know that as the liquid flows down my throat, in a few moments, I'll enter a new state of existence, where fear and anxiety do not exist? Where I am one with the plane and the seat? where I can take a moment of reprieve from my daily encounters with my own questions of existence?

So, this past month of December, I have been in many many many situations where I am supposed to present myself. I'm asked what I do. Essentially, asked, who am I? Am I worthy of your time? Will you spend 5 minutes? 10 minutes? or over an hour conversing with me? Will you find what I say to answer that question enough to continue a dialogue with me? Will I find what you say intriguing enough? Or, will I want to move on to another human being, passing you by for lack of "a story". The encounter was empty, the encounter was shallow. The encounter was missing the connection necessary to maintain a spark of life.

Why are we here? As I write this sentence, my emotions go from awe and curiosity to anger and frustration and finally back to merely giving up and surrendering to the unknown. Sometimes it is awe inspiring, sometimes it produces anger and frustration and sometimes, usually, after so many questions, it just leaves one resigned, void of feeling. Ah, turbulence! Can I turn this anxiety into awe? Can I let my mind create something different in my body. Can I find a higher power within my mind to let go of the anxiety? Can I do it without the help of alcohol? I know I WILL DIE one day. Does not knowing what is ahead, how I will live out my life, how I will meet my death leave me feeling anxious? Or can I look at it as a huge surprise, an opportunity, an encounter with a potential new friend?

You know, I have to bring this up as well. I still focus a lot on how heavy I feel I am. I wonder how I've come to identify myself with being overweight. do I see my body as beautiful, no matter what shape or size it is? Or am I at constant war with my body - seeing it as the enemy, to be avoided and detested? Do I separate myself from the rolls of flab, or do I embrace them as sensuous curves of juicy flesh? There are always two sides to everything and more than one way of looking at things. There is no one reality. Your reality and mine are like 2 foreign alphabets - both can spell the same words that have the same meaning, but they look and sound drastically different. Perhaps that is what reality is. The same meaning but through the perspective of different sounds and symbols, that neither can understand.

In the quietness, let go of symbols and sound, and look deeper for the more subtle meanings within your heart. Oh, I wonder what she is thinking. What memories pass through her mind, moment by moment. Does she recall the good, or does she see those embarrassing moments in life that make our cheeks flush? Does she chuckle to herself as these memories flood her sharp mind? Or does she squeeze her eyes shut tight and shutter at the memories? Is she so caught up in the physical moment of her body betraying her mind, leaving her weak, breathless and in pain? Does she feel her heart inside her own chest, pumping painfully and slowly, trying to do it's job, but falling short every third or fourth beat, allowing liquid to accumulate and increasing the challenge of work that much more? What must it be like to know your heart is old and dying, but you still possess a mind so sharp, you can't stop thinking? What is it like to look down upon your hands, your arms, and see paper thin, discolored skin? For how many years do you see that and get used to it? do we detach ourselves from our own physical reality? I think so, I know that I have from my own. Sometimes I am all too aware of my own physical condition.

Grandmother, the beacon of our family at 97, has lived through almost an entire century. She has born witness to the birth and rise of nation-states. The presidencies of over 15 presidents, drastic worldwide changes and the incredible explosion of human growth on this planet. In her lifetime, we have seen the world population go from under 2 billion to over nearly 6 billion. Do I fear death because I love life so much? Or do I fear death because I don't know what it is? Does grandmommy fear death? Does she look to death now that it is imminent and welcome it? Can you truly embrace the grim reaper? Or, will there always be resistance? When a person is sick, old or weak, does their physical state leave them in the mental state of acceptance? Or are they just too weak to resist? I don't believe, unless one commits suicide, that we have any control over that last moment. Our last breath - either knocked clear out of us in a horrible accident, or slowly seeped out of us through disease. That moment when somehow, our mind, the consciousness that gives us our meager meanings, somehow vanishes along with the life in the physical body. However, I still want to know, does this ego, this conscience, this mind - that I call "I", "me", "mine" - does it go on and exist beyond the life of this earthly body? Why is this question so vastly important to me? Why, with all my logical thinking, am I incapable of finding an answer? Perhaps it's at moments like these, when someone dear to you is near to death, that the question of our purpose here on earth becomes so poignant.

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