📃🪶 These Last 12 weeks of her life she looks more alive than I've seen her in years
Last Updated: 3 months, 3 weeks ago
If Losing Her was about grief, this one might be about acceptance and celebrating the beautiful, intangible lives we have left, however short they may be.
She refers to them as “12 more weeks” although at the time of first writing this the date is not set or certain yet.
Still, she’s holding onto the hope.
She was Back
She was in her element, and far more than I'd seen in a long time.
Her strength radiated as it once had before.
She fought me, she argued, seemingly almost tirelessly, against my - probably bad - logic, for my sake, because she wanted to help me.
And we got to spend time together.
For years it was just tiredness and so much pain for her.
And I know that's still how it is when we're not around.
She's probably resting, as she does after a big event, often for days, a week, or even ten or eleven days.
ME/CFS is hell when its degeneration reaches this degree.
Seeing her like this makes me glad.
I am even happier for her than before, that she is getting what she wants, what she needs.
Her life has been meaningful, but more than that, she is living it even now, even to the last breath, determined to knock what she can off her bucketlist.
Lately … well, this past year - since I learned a year ago almost to the day that she was dying, was to die - I have been wrestling with the terror of death as an atheist.
I don't understand why.
Reminders of my Enslavement - My Fear of Afterlife and Life Before Death
It makes so much more sense that the fear of eternal hell should have been more terrifying, and it was.
I'd been comforted, had comforted myself, with apparent salvation, and some magical thinking that somehow God would save all the good people I knew, because surely He loved them even more than I did and being all-powerful was far, far more able than me to save the whole world in this limited time that was their lifetimes. That there must be some revelation they perceived or would perceive, because they were rational, reasonable, good people. Maybe hell was never going to happen somehow, even though it was. My cognitive dissonance could always find a way, with faith as a crutch, no, faith to lend wings to an argument that could not stand let alone walk on its own.
Someone had once described oblivion as a terrifying concept, and at the time, believing in an afterlife, I couldn't relate. Oblivion meant no hell! No eternal torture! Just sweet rest without any awareness of anything bad! Being done with it all, once you’d lived a hopefully-good and meaingful life! Or the end to suffering, an escape from the terrifying prospect of it persisting forever, if you had lived the worst, most tortured life imaginable! Surely that was better? Knowing one day it would end and there’d be no suffering? And if I could choose what I believed, and make that belief manifest into truth, I would far have preferred that! Eternity itself was daunting to consider! Even heaven was an intimidating concept - the pressure of having to do EVERYTHING as well as possible, in finite time, to ensure your eternal afterlife had no regrets, that you weren't wishing you'd done better at something and stored up more heavenly treasures through earthly good deeds while you had the chance? And I guess, trying not to wrestle with the cognitive dissonance of how staying in one place ruled by what was already making me so miserable, for evernity, would be eternal bliss when I wasn’t happy on earth in my current life, as a then evangelical.
Relentless. Terrifying. Exhausting this rat race for eternity all was.
Compared to just… rest. A relief that consciousness didn't have to be forever, that you could actually just go through life, that nobody would EVER be able to torment you eternally. Hell, or some eternal punishment, was the whole point of why people needed saving! Where is the need for a saviour if there isn’t a desperate need for salvation?
When it really comes down to it, maybe I was afraid of life. That immense pressure to maintain everything for the afterlife knowing it would never be enough, that I would fuck up somehow...
Cult indoctrination is psychological enslavement. And no, I don't take that word lightly. There is a whole lot more I could say about cults, their authoritarian control and my experiences of them - it's becoming its whole section on my blog - but that is not for today.
Reminders of Mortality - My Fear of Death, and No Afterlife
But a few years after losing my faith, or as I prefer to see it gaining skepticism, that belief in no afterlife … or that lack of belief in one … had to come to me. Even then, all I felt was relief that there WAS no hell. It was all a lie.
Hearing about her shortened lifespan, shortened to then-likely one year (and “likely” is coming to pass) may have been when the terror started.
Before that, it had just been a growing awareness and a growing pressure, amped up by being in three major car accidents, none of which I had been responsible for and only one of which I'd been driving in, but so of which I'd been sitting in the side nearest to where the impacting car struck head-on and felt that impact.
And later, three already-fairly-unusual near-misses on a motorcycle on the same day, due to chance, weather and the general disregard towards motorcycles on the road by both larger vehicles and pedestrians. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
I'd refused to let go of the pressure to live life without regrets, and to never forget about death, after learning about Momento Mori and the significance and possibly internalising the exact wrong message: one of fear of missing out, fear of loss before one’s time, eternal fear, and never truly “living”. Immense pressure. Fear of the inevitable ultimate loss, the time I could not stop, and what it would be like to cease to live. Those near-death experiences I’d read about, with people NOT experiencing anything, were the scariest for me. The brain could hallucinate all kinds of “afterlife” experiences when one was close to dying, in line with the beliefs one had been taught. It could also hallucinate nothing at all. Disappear. And then reappear if resuscitated to tell people that there was nothing.
And again, after that day when I had three near misses on my motorcycle, through sheer dumb misfortune: a car tailing me way too close and unprepared for me to brake at a swift-changing stoplight, a pedestrian looking for all intents and purposes as if he was ready to run across a busy highway around a bend on a flyover of all places (these two on the same commute) and later, apon my return from work on that same flyover, a powerful lateral gust of wind that sent me to the edge of my lane, uncomfortably close to the minivan lurking and slowly approaching via my blind spot while I focused all my efforts and concentration on keeping the bike on the road on that necessary same flyover curve on the way back.
This happened less than a year before losing my faith - officially, through finally being honest with myself about the inconsistencies I couldn't reconcile.
I'd also been wrestling with the paralysing anxiety, the stress of whether I'd even get to see her and say goodbye, with everything happening with so much absence, always so much stress and pain for her to suffer, as her partner and carer also struggled with so much in trying to keep them both, and countless other people, afloat.
There was ongoing pain and trauma - so much of it - for all of us in our tight-knit chosen family network, but especially for those two. Though her partner's pain wasn't the physical sort, her own fatigue from contracting long COVID was real too.
But seeing her now, tonight...
Change
This had been different.
True, maybe this was just a good day. Maybe I only ever saw her at her best, like the other friend visitors. But I like to think she was doing better because she was less burdened. Time was growing closer, things were set in motion and she would finally be able to get her wish of assisted death - to die on her terms.
She was gaining more peace, possibly even more energy. She was relaxed, now that her wishes were finally being fulfilled, and she would get to die on her terms, her way, her choice, on her timeline, or admittedly, still later than she'd hoped for.
Finally, though it had been such a process for them to be able to finally afford everything and to get all her documentation in order, they would be flying to the one country in the world and the one company in the world that allows non-citizens the hope, the choice of death with dignity. To end their suffering.
And, as I held onto and hold onto these last few weeks we have together, seeing her fight, get annoyed and talk about the little things with that same energy and spirit, and seeing how she passionately expresses care for those she loves by fighting them when there’s something they need to hear, I am glad.
I am glad to see her finally seeming as she was back when I knew her before. Back before she got sick.
As time grows closer to the date of her death, to that day she is looking forward to, I am glad to see her looking so...
Alive.
Thanks for reading! Subscribe to my free newsletter or follow my RSS feed!