When my father was still alive, still very alive despite having prostate cancer that had, at long last, moved into his bones, he was mildly explosive with his insights: he would have a lot to say, and it would come out of him in a minor torrent. Usually they were about his life. After one particularly harrowing visit with his oncologist who had given him some really high numbers relating to some really lousy test results, he walked up to me in my condominium and told me that being with Mom was amazing. "What a ride" he'd said about his life with her (and since he was from a different time and place when he aquired his slang, it meant that it had been an adventure to be married to her. The possibility that he might be using some double entendre about his wife to his child never occured to him.)
"Dad, you're not dead yet! Stop talking like that" I said, or something like it. I had the self-awareness to say it gently, at least, but when I think of it I wince at the selfishness of my poor stupid younger self, trying to get away from those implications. As if it were about me. Fortunately, Dad would not be put off: he was trying to talk about my mother, his wife of many years, his soul mate. He talked about how she wouldn't have much truck with romance and flowery talk, how she didn't care at all about how she looked, not really, but how much he saw her beauty anyway. It was a pretty fantastic moment, and I'd gladly lose a limb to have him around to tell me- for too long, of course, because he was an old dude and that's what old dudes do- but I'd happily sit there, minus an arm or leg, massaging the place where it used to be and listening to him go on about my mother.
This is something that he would say a lot during that last two or three years: he'd tell me his latest PSA count (Prostate Specific Antogen) was over 1,000. "What?" I'd always say. "How are you still standing?" And he'd explain that he'd just go on, or try a new medication, or sleep during the day. "Besides, it's better than the alternative." This was his sum-up: all of that was still better than being dead. And lately that sentiment has been seeping into all sorts of situations, just like I was the heroine of a long-standing situation comedy and that sentiment was my precocious niece who'd dressed as a boy and gotten herself locked in the linen cabinet right by the master bedroom in the haunted hotel we're staying in....Yeah, like that. Pretty much.
I'm prone to anxiety (well, "prone to" might be a bit of misrepresentation- it's more like I'm "forced to experience" anxiety.) Anything can become fraught when you're afraid of doing things wrong, such as making phone calls to someone who answers phones for your dentist or shopping for garden supplies. I was in a garden center yeseterday, a big one that also sells shoes and coffees and hot tubs, and it was a miracle that I made it out alive- I start to sputter and wander ineffectively when I'm around that much vegetative choice. My mother was an excellent gardener, and I want to be a gardener at least, so I go to garden centers. I leave after an hour and a half of rambling around, usually empty handed or perhaps with another toy for my dogs, who need toys just like I need additonal fat stores. I can't handle the choice, I can't handle the responsibility, I don't know when to put a cloche on a tomato plant. The spirit of the The Gardeer tsk's me under her breath, which should prove to me that it's not really my mother it's that unwanted precocious niece, wreaking her havoc. It's what anxiety does.
And just lately that saying has come to me, like the incongruously helpful concierge in my personal sitcom, reminding me in a steady and calming voice that being out and choosing something is better than the alternative. In that circumstance, the alternative is staying at home to feel un-challenged, un-stimulated, and therefore not moving forward. Not trying anything new, or just not trying at all. I'd never have thought of myself this way: as someone who is in any danger of stagnation, as someone who has a clear path to the non-stop panic of the shut-in or partial shut-in. In my twenties I was clear about my priorities, and when I thought about the dangers of staying alive they would be images of staying up too late and messing up my skin, or not meeting the right person to marry. I thought about being famous and the perils of becoming famous- which to my mind were non-issues, and so I barely thought about them.
But that disregard was way before the stupid realities of continuing to breathe here on Earth poked their stupid heads in my glorious imaginings (seriously: fame? What for?) It was certainly before I did find the right person to marry, and have a child with him, and go to the doctor to find out what was the deal with all the pain all the time and all the sleeplessness. It was before the diagnosis of a lifetime of said pain, sorry about that, and it was before the death of three people I loved, two of whom were my parents. My beautiful, frustrating, idiosyncratic, hopeful parents are gone. I have to be my own parent now, in addition to being a parent to a beautiful, idiosyncratic, demanding, special needs child. So it's no fucking wonder, really, that it's hard to make a move now, since making moves can make things change, and change has been a very bad neighbor of mine for the past thirteen years...but: when I'm scared of whatever it is- buying the wrong plant, for example- I'm remembering that buying the wrong plant is better than the alternative.
I could be the shut-in or partial shut-in, I suppose; however, I have better things to do. There's travel to plan and fruit to forage in the summer, and subsequently there's jam to make. There are plants to buy and then kill, or not (hopefully not.) There's home to go to and home to visit. There's languages to learn how to speak, in support of the travel that needs to happen. Did I mention my husband? He has amazing laugh lines, and I have to watch them open and close when he's just seen or heard something really funny. As he gets older they get better. So: there are a great many reasons to fight the squeezy hand of worry, and the fighting is in itself much, much better than the alternative.
