Through rose tinted glasses

I am a sentimentalist at heart.  One only has to stroll through my home to see the little things I have placed in every room; a tiny glass vial that holds water from the Ganges, the amethyst crystal on my the bedside table, a photo of my friends and I from our trip to Italy, the ashes of my sweet baby girl Sylvia.  These and others that I have about, or are stored in memory boxes, hold deep meaning for me.  This is not to say that they are who I am; they are not.  They are though a representation of who I am much like the colors, form, and fabric I have chosen.  They are all, in a sense, an emotional and physical road map of my being, my history, and that of my family, both biological and chosen.  They tell the story of the friends that I have loved and lost, of parents and grandparents, of partners who are no longer in this world.  The other day I took out one of my memory boxes as I am in the midst of a deep spring clean the reasons of which I will explain later.  It was filled with letters and cards from my late teens and early twenties, letters from my first lover, ones filled with his professions of eternal love, of building a life together, and later of the frustrations of living separate lives in different states.  Birthday cards from my Gram and a favorite aunt.  Letters from dear friends all of who are lost to me now.  It’s interesting to me how in the first blush of adulthood we see things through rose tinted glasses.  Those honeyed phrases like, to have and to hold, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.  We pledge eternal love and friendship to those in our lives never presupposing that anything could change, that we could fail out of love, or lose contact, or that they would leave this earth before us.  I experienced a great deal of loss after moving to San Francisco in those heady days of the late Seventies.  Who amongst us could have foreseen  what level of loss we would experience in just ten short years, what it would be like to have such an intimate relationship with death forced upon us at such an early age.  I am grateful to Goddess that I have survived when almost all of my friends of that time did not.  Many of the sentimental things in my home were given to me by those very friends that passed so early in their lives.  One memory box held gifts from my former long term partner’s brother, from close friends, and lovers, mementos that I still find impossible to let go of.  Sitting on the floor in my bedroom, these mementos scattered about me, I cried as I read the letters from my first lover, as I held long faded pictures of Tyler when we first met, the both of us in the full blush of youthfulness, of pictures of my Gram surrounded by my aunts and I on her Ninety birthday.  This is not to say that I regularly wallow in this kind of dripping sentimentality, I do not, as a rule.  As I said before this adventure into my past was in part due to an ongoing deep spring clean that I am presently engaged in and why I have chosen to write again.   It is not easy for me to share intimate details regarding my health in general.  I have for many years shared about my emotional struggles with my childhood memories.  In fact that was the reason I started this blog in 2009 during the tumult of those years of my recovery.  It was a way for me to speak my truth in the face of the denial of my family and of society.  In those blogs I rarely if ever share about my physical struggles or not that I remember.  (Now I have the urge to reread every one to see if I have indeed written about it before.  Ahhh, the mind does play tricks.)   To say what I came here to say:  I have been struggling with breathing issues for some time now.  It’s been a progressive issue over the last few years that prompted a recent visit to a lung specialist.  A CT Scan later and the doctor has found that I have asthma.  Not an insurmountable problem for me.  In actuality there was a relatively easy fix.  I now use a powdered steroid inhaler in addition to my old inhaler.  The problem that I am now struggling with and that I am now willing to share outside my close circle of friends is that they also found two small growths in my upper right lung, growths that bear watching.  To that end I will have to have repeated scans in the coming months to monitor the size and to check for any additional ones that may appear.  The other significant issue they found was that I have a heart abnormality, one that my primary care doctor said is evidence of an old heart attack.  In retrospect I suspect that is possibly related to when my body crashed in 2006 but I am not sure.  It would certainly make sense of the non-sensical as no medical professional has ever been able to pinpoint the cause of that crash, the results of which I still deal with.   I am hoping that my new cardo doc will be able to confirm when I see them.  It is these last two issues that have forced me to inhabit emotional territory to which I have not had to do before, that of questions relating to my mortality.  Nothing like a couple of shots across the bow of my mortality to get me motived to do a deep spring clean.  I’ve seen what others had to go through when attending to the estates of their dearly departed, what I had to look through when I did it for my friends.  There are always those questions like, why and the hell would he keep a picture of a rock in the middle of a forest, or a piece of the rock itself.  What is this?  A half of broken heart on a chain.  Where’s the other half and did he even remember who had it?  I couldn’t by the way, remember who had the other half.  I did try.  I seem to remember it being a girl.  Or was that a boy dressed as a girl.  Either way it ended up in the trash with many other things that I could also not identify.  Did I say I’m having memory problems too.  I am also not sharing this information because I expect to die soon, quite the contrary.  I suspect I’ll live well into my Nineties like my paternal Gram did and like my father has now, a guy who on some days is more busy then I am.  He leaves me check-in messages almost every day about driving around visiting friends, going out to dinner, and the like.  About leaving his apartment at noon and not returning until past eight in the evening.  No, I’m not writing this because I have any concerns regarding my imminent demise.  My reasonings for this blog and the deep clean is, I suppose, because I am searching for a way to access that emotional territory of powerlessness, the one that I haven’t yet had to do.  This is not to say that my health has been extraordinary.  Quite the opposite.  I have and have had challenges with my physical health for eleven years or more, things that I have had to find a way to coexist with and still have a quality life.  I have, at the best of times, ongoing issues with fatigue, ones that stem from 2006, and alignment issues with my hips and sacrum as well.  Prior to this latest diagnosis I also use to get up in the morning wondering what truck had hit me during the night that I didn’t remember.  My dad and I had that conversation once about a year ago.  We both shared that we are about thirty three on the inside and think we can still do the things we did when we were, that is until we stand too quickly, or turn and find that the left side of our body’s seem to be going in the opposite direction of that of the right, or when we trip over imaginary things laying on the carpet while we feel our way to the bath in the middle of the night; multiple times thank you very much.  Or when we swing our body’s over the side of the bed in the morning and hear the sounds of crunching bone fragments readjusting themselves in our knees, or elbows, or backs, or all three.  Aging is such an undignified process.  We laugh at the stories that our elder relatives or friends tell us recounting how they laughed just a little too hard at a joke, or pulled a chair just a little too aggressively, until those very things happens to us.  Then we are horrified at the thought that someone may have witnessed our distress all the while laughing on the inside on how undignified the process really is and what else may the future hold for us.  And that is the territory of powerlessness that I am now charged with navigating, what does the future hold for me.  I can only hope that my recovery will guide me in living that question until someday I may live into the answer if I am to have the answer at all.  Until then I will be swinging from the trees and dancing in the streets until that is my cardiologist tells me to stop.  And I may not even then.