All Falling, All the Time...

Another day of 'do I really have to do this?'. 

Well, of course I'm still rattled by the unexpected, untimely death of someone who'd begun to be a close friend.  I feel a bit dizzy, and disinterested in just about everything. 

Is there any good at all to be gained from retailing the particulars?   The treacherous trap-doors that mere living can lay for the most industrious of us -- the backward imbalance of hard work and intense diligence being rewarded (if that's what you call it) with a sudden outburst of illness, a spate of misfortune, a precipitous fall into penury and ill health -- aren't these the cliches of daytime television and Victorian novels and any number of first-run films, where incredibly fortunate and beautiful people pretend to have really terrible lives?

I try to tell myself that I don't expect much of anything, but this has been a particularly grim wrench -- how long did the body lie there, in the spartan studio apartment, partly subsidized by tax payers -- some of whom, apparently, would have preferred that this less fortunate American be sent back out on the street again, to scrounge for food under a bridge someplace, because manic depression had raised its pitiless head?  I don't know where to unload the anger that is seeping up.  I don't know who to curse.  I'm just waiting for someone, meaning well as usual, casually observes that 'God never gives us more than we can handle.'  I strenuously beg to differ.  I beg to differ with flames coming out of my head.

And so, once again, I see corpses everywhere.  The cheery red-headed woman in the beige trench coat, laughing in the street outside the coffee shop where I'm sitting, stunned?  A corpse who just doesn't realize it yet.  I confess that I even try to make out the contours of the skull, when the identifying fleshy sheath has dropped away.  Nothing personal, ma'am.  Just my dreary vision today.

So, while I tell myself that, after all, death is inevitable for all of us, why should this statistical glitch -- crossing the threshhold into eternal coldness at age 52, say, instead of twenty years later -- surprise me?  But it's a profound shock.  I must still need the idea that there's some kind of script out there, and that I'm safe, as long as I'm responsible about playing my part.  Which of course is completely illusory.  Completely.  Illusory.

Can I live effectively, facing this basic truth without some cosmetic covering of myth or religion or life insurance actuarial tables draped over it?  (I'm still determined, by the way -- perhaps even more determined than ever, if it's not too soon to judge -- to reach out as best I can to those fellow humans with whom I come in contact every day.  Asking, 'how are you?'.  Finding something pleasant to say, even if it's to compliment the cashier on the three fingernails out of ten that she's lacquered turquoise. I feel almost ferocious in this need to see someone else smile at something I've said, however meaningless and trivial. 

Because, if we're all falling, all the time -- if the edge of the cliff I used to think I was living on is, in fact, miles above me, years behind me -- these tiniest of kindnesses are all that I know of, that make some sliver sense out of my biological insistence on continued respiration, ingestion, and all the other operations that keep flesh functional. 

These silly little thirty-second contacts protect no one.  They solve nothing.  They offer no delay.  But, pathetic as they undoubtedly are, they are what little I can do, in the face of the implacable, whimsically-timed ending in store for everyone.  I must be the stupidest person on the planet, that this most elemental fact of life seems poised to lift the level ground on which I think I live, and to slide me over into an inescapably deep mire of despair.

Signing off.


©   2013        Walter Zimmerman  (by the way, this copyright thing is John's idea)