"Only OK if I say something objective and stoical: Ian remarking that a time might come when I’d have to let go: Carol asking about Rebecca’s wedding “Are you afraid you won’t see England again?” Also, ordinary expressions like “expiration date”… will I outlive my Amex? My driver’s license? People say— I’m in town on Friday: will you be around? WHAT A QUESTION!
- Christopher Hitchens, Morality
Ever since I read Hitchens last book (and what a book it was) in 2012; I knew time would come when I would ask a similar question with Max. And I did in 2015.
Max had benign Melanoma scare in 2015 and the week after surgery when the Vet told us nothing to worry about, I asked for refill of his ear cleaning liquid. The vet's office had only the largest size bottle and gave that for Max. The date on the bottle was 08/13/2015. The first thought that came to mind was will Max outlive before this bottle goes empty.
On 12/20/2019 Max passed away and the bottle was still not empty. Neo, Fluffy and Garph started using it and eventually, on 06/01/2021 - almost seven years later, it's now empty.
To quote Hitches again on how body dissipates slowly in front of our eyes:
It’s normally agreed that the question ‘How are you?’ doesn’t put you on your oath to give a full or honest answer. So when asked these days, I tend to say something cryptic like, ‘A bit early to say.’ (If it’s the wonderful staff at my oncology clinic who inquire, I sometimes go so far as to respond, ‘I seem to have cancer today.’) Nobody wants to be told about the countless minor horrors and humiliations that become facts of ‘life’ when your body turns from being a friend to being a foe: the boring switch from chronic constipation to its sudden dramatic opposite; the equally nasty double cross of feeling acute hunger while fearing even the scent of food; the absolute misery of gut-wringing nausea on an utterly empty stomach; or the pathetic discovery that hair loss extends to the disappearance of the follicles in your nostrils, and thus to the childish and irritating phenomenon of a permanently runny nose. Sorry, but you did ask… It’s no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don’t have a body, I am a body.
In hindsight, now with little more knowledge on how cancer works and metastasis being an oxymoron - I should have taken Max's 2015 benign melanoma extremely seriously. Cancer and metastatic doesn't care about our "benign" classification.
I bought a new bottle of ear cleaning liquid for Neo which is half the size of the bottle Max used. The question now is will I outlive that bottle?
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