verushka70

You are about the forty third person I've talked to who has mentioned so many losses in the last year or two or three. I pray 2008 will be better for all of us! I'm so sorry to hear of your friends and your husband's deaths. There has been so much sadness in the lives of so many people I know -- and in my own. I also felt like death was stalking my family, after my father's accident and decline, my stepdad's cancer diagnosis, my father's death, one year later my mother's cancer diagnosis, my stepfather's worsening cancer the past two summers with brief respites, only to have him die this past October, then my own "What's that discharge??" scare and first mammogram -- diagnostic, not routine screening.

Never realized that someone as suicidally depressed as I've been, as often as I've been, would have such a strong desire to live. You'd think a malignant discharge would be my suicidal dreams come true. But suddenly I thought, wait, I never learned Spanish or French or Italian or sufficiently improved my German! I never saw the Pyramids or Alaska or Vancouver or Montreal or Prague or Machu Pichu! Or even California! Perverse, huh? For all my misery over the years, I hadn't expected to cling so tightly to the life which afflicts me.

There have been some glimmers of hope. I finished nursing school, turned 40 and survived (worked a 12 hour shift the night before and 12 hour shift the night of!), and have been an ER nurse for the past four months. It lets me see the misery of other people's lives. There is a lot of it. A lot. Especially in those families that are broken, chaotic, too violent, too unstable to support each other. Though we may do a lot of infighting (more like "in-bickering"), at least my siblings and I put up a united front to family threats.

Someone told me once a long time ago (before I had to actually prove it) that I was a survivor. They meant of our shitty home environment before my parents finally split up, but I guess it translated into survivor skills.

The only problem with being a survivor, of course, is that you run the risk of being the last one left. Sounds like that has happened to you, and I'm so sorry. I know what you mean about death mocking you or stalking you or whatever we choose to call it. I suppose, in a way, death stalks us from the minute we're born. It just doesn't feel that way when you have friends and loved ones to walk by your side through life.

Now I worry that, with my woeful choices of unavailable or perpetually immature men (and my own great ambivalence towards marriage and terror of suffocation) and choices (thus far) not to breed, I'll be one of the many looking into my old age with no one to care for me, except possibly my nephews. I terrifies me because I see these people in the ER often. But then I also see the people kept in shit-hole nursing homes (some who have children), and they are often no better off -- often worse off. Seems there's no guarantees whether you have children or not.

Then I tell myself I'm going to get out there and shovel snow, start walking for exercise, be more active so I can stay as healthy as possible to the end (use it or lose it, right)?

But what really happens is I eat more left-over Christmas cookies, curl up in bed to read, or on the couch to watch a DVD or AVIs from my computer, or in bed with my cats and laptop to write fanfic. Clearly, I'm not scared enough. Not just yet. Not for anything like real self-improvement (she said sarcastically). It's like Beckett: You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.