All Quiet

I'm still here, still sober, still hanging on. I'm going to start looking for another job, and at the same time I'm finally working towards getting the business started. Most of my time, though, has been eaten up by work, or by recovering from work, and so I've not had much energy. I hate my job, and it's precisely because it's so inoffensive and bland and unexciting. It's like living on three meals a day of unsalted crackers and water. You -can- live that way, but there's not much joy in it.

I've also been thinking about how I need to start preparing for the rest of my life. It occurs to me that I'm quite likely going to die alone, and that's not a pearl-clutching "poor-me" statement; it's a statement of a very likely fact. LJ, even if he does stay around, will not outlive me; he's already leaning heavily towards some serious health problems. I'm not going to have kids to take care of me, and I've got no siblings, and thus no nieces and nephews. I'm not close to my extended family, and my mother will be 77 on her next birthday, and my closest friends live far away. There is not going to be anyone to take care of me when I'm old, and I need to start preparing for that eventuality. I need to think about money, and where it's going to come from; about appointing someone to make decisions for me in case I can't, or to look out for me when I'm no longer able to look out for myself. And these are all good, motivational-type thoughts, in a way-- but in another way they're not, since they all invoke the specter of being, at the end of my life, all alone. It's not a happy thought, but there's not much about it I can change.

You know what I think about most, when I think about the end of my life? I think about all the things that mean something to me. I think about the afghans I've crocheted, the quilts I've made, the books that used to be JP's; I think of all the pottery I painted with Firefly, and all the little artsy things I've done since. I've been spending a lot of time in thrift stores lately--there's a great one just down the street from Dr. J's office--and I see a lot of things that I know once meant a lot to someone. Cookbooks, for example; today I bought a cookbook from 1948, autographed by the author, with a bookmark in it that was a slip of paper which turned out to be a ticket from a 1961 train trip to Pennsylvania. I see a lot of paintings in the thrift stores, paintings that look like they were done by amateurs; the proprietor tells me that she gets a lot of photo albums with the photos still in them. She and I have talked for a long time about how amazing it is, some of the things that people part with sometimes.

And when I think about it, I think: those must have been people like me--people who, when they died, had no one to leave these things to who would see them for what they were, and how much they'd mattered. I've been guilty myself, I know; some of JP's belongings ended up in the hands of people who couldn't possibly know their importance. But I made it a point not to be stingy with the memories I had of him; I know I wasn't the only one who lost something when he died. And then there were the things that didn't survive the various habits, things I had no business selling. I think about those things sometimes too.

Mostly I think: there's going to be no one else who has my memories, when I'm gone. Huge swaths of time that mean everything to me, and nothing to anyone else, are going to die with me. And maybe that's true of everyone, but somehow I think of everyone else as having someone--a sibling, a child, a partner--to pass some of these memories on to. I'm not going to have any of those things; and then again, so much of it is trivia, little things that wouldn't mean anything if I -did- have someone to pass them on to.

It's almost enough to make me question: what's the worth of doing anything? But then I think: I'm here; I may as well do something, after all, and it may as well be something I enjoy. So I collect my old cookbooks, and hunt through the thrift stores for other people's afghans, which I then take home and rescue from oblivion. Some day they'll go back out into the pool of forgotten objects, along with a few things of my own. Maybe that's just the way of the world.