The year I died.

 

It was ordinary. 

the final countdown.

I've been talking about it all along, the premonition that I would be dead at a specific age, verified a multitude of ways a multitude of times including the one that specified The Date. 9/27/2024.  I've officially entered my last year of life. 

Knowing all along I could be wrong, so maybe not blow my savings just in case, all hundreds of dollars. Low hundreds. 

But I'm probably not wrong and so what are my necessary goals this final year? I've none. 

No requisite parachute dive, no visiting the Pyramids. I will not run a marathon. Or run. 

Though there were a few things I did want to do once upon a time. Ride my bike on the freeway during rush hour traffic when I'd be the only thing moving. Walk around naked in public, which I've avoided not out of concern for my exposed genitals but for the flab gathered around my mid section. Be the live breaking news, a police chase, again me on my bike, being able to navigate space they cannot and ultimately prevailing even with the helicopter hovering. Lots of bike fantasies. There are stretches of ride that are admittedly not engaging so the mind wanders.  For years I entertained myself on those stretches with emotive lines from Charlton Heston movies. You can kill miles with that one.

Come to think of it, I can combine the freeway ride and the police chase.  Duh. 

In the end the life I have is the life that is.  If I wanted to experience something so badly I would have.  Sure, there are things I would REALLY LIKE to do, mostly at this point in the game my exit plan. I want to live long enough to drive away. And there lingers a sense of unfinishedness, tasks mostly, paintings. 

I think I've not driven away because I am waiting to see if I die. This is the gamble. I wait until until I know I won't be dead 5 minutes after I leave and I am. But I'm also seduced by the idea - the one that never actually happens so misguided fantasy, really - that everything up in the air right now magically convenes and resolves into a bow-wrapped package that allows a tidy exit. Meaning, sort of, there is a possibility the death may be spiritual or some other symbolic demise. 

So we wait and see, now.

Something went wrong somewhere, and here we are.  

I don't know what this world-this-life is I am experiencing that is so different from the running narrative, or why it is that way.  Unless it is not and I am ahead of the curve and I simply accept it than pretend?  Nah. 

My current job is remarkable in its relentlessness. It doesn't cease, but it sometimes sighs.  I look at my watch and think, mmm, lunch in maybe another half hour.  WRONG LUNCH NOW THERE IS NO HALF HOUR.  Plans are pointless, all of them.  Every once in a while a window of nothing presents.  I am getting better, learning, to ID those windows and also just GO and get something done IT WILL END.

I spend a lot of time these days in my apartment at night in disbelief the day appears to have ended. The days are never-ending, and yet every night I do indeed return to my apartment and go to bed.  Sometimes dinner is after 10 pm or later, and sleep is only a few hours, but so far it's happened that it happens, every day. 

While I am standing there in disbelief that I am there, it is also, after all the hours, standing in a sudden nothingness. Silence. There is so much I just stepped out of, I walk through the door with hours of weight and volume and velocity into this sudden STOP, equal, opposite, also extraordinary. 

There is no one there.  And as long as I've been doing this, voluntarily, I remain amazed that a man goes home to silence and there are no further words. In the end we exist alone. Our burdens are ours to carry. And they are luxury, editorial liberty. There are no burdens!  How indulgent we are to decide actions of no opinion carry intent.  Milk spills, it's not personal. 

I go home tired nonetheless.  I am tired, often to the bone's marrow. Tomorrow is already not a better day, there will be no better days, so here we are.   

I stand in the kitchen and start to make dinner.  I turn nothing on, I just want to stand there and not even stand there. And I think about all that lives inside me, all the noise and exhaustion. I wonder about other people's lives vibrant with end of day stories and conversations and seats at the table. The stories that are just of that day, the stories that are now sagas, here is today's chapter.  The stories they get to tell. The voices they get to have. 

Who was I talking to, it was so recent? Dying surrounded by loved ones. I can't think of a worse way to go, I said.  Why TF would anyone EVER want someone to see them die? Who'd want to die with a bunch of people staring at you? When do we ever finally get to occupy our voices our stories our lives that are ours? 

Sitting on the toilet this morning, waiting for Godot - I wouldn't give my ass to my worst enemy -  wondering if my mother were still alive somewhere. Or not.  I most likely will never know. I mean at some point, if I live long enough,  I can sort of assume.  Minus proof, it will always be an assumption.  My people live long. Too long for my taste or plans.  My grandfather was in his mid 90's, my father near 90.  My mother will be 90 next birthday, it's not impossible she continues. 

My younger brother and I were friends once, when kids.  He's a Republican now, proudly. I mean I'd still hang out with you were you a Reagan Republican. I wouldn't talk to you too much.  Proud Trump Republican, no. 

I otherwise admire him, though.  Minus any parenting or help or guidance he's managed to put what appears to be, anyway, a secure life for himself. He found his way to his way and I can't be too hostile to the moments necessary for him to cling onto towards it.  I knew when my father died I'd never hear from him again. Oh, right, OUR father, I forget, he was so removed from any relationship with him the last many years. The writing was on the wall, his disappearance into the ether.

He remained in his mother's life, was (is?) her primary caretaker, most likely harbors a whole slew of opinions and emotions towards us for abandoning the mother ship, a place from which diving into the savage sea seemed a more likely survival tactic than remaining dry on board.

So as patiently as I wait for my shit to exist, I wait for my mother to cease.  There are two relationships we have with our parents, maybe?, the one while they're alive and the one after they die. A while back a friends husband died and she was not at all shy about her dislike for him and the legacy of his memory. It was my first glimpse that the narrative of the dead might not be what we're fed, that we're eternally broken over the loss, filled with inconsolable sorrow and grief.  (Hollywood, again gone awry.) No, it's more complicated, it will include the final years, the final hours, the final service, the meal after. It will include the time it takes for it all to land, this thing that was your entire life-in-two-parts, before and after. 

Someone I know is losing his first parent right now. I wait for it to realize itself, the expanse of process. It's a curious and rarified space to occupy. It has opportunities and freedoms and sorrows we'll never be able to fix, the cumulative legacy.  

I myself look forward to it. Will it ever be over, this-story-this-relationship that has metastasized my life my identity my sense my idea of self-as-self? I will most likely never have the satisfaction of the death knell, that sigh of relief, closure.  More, it is most likely a fantasy mistaken, the one where I think I will hear of this person's death and breathe free air for the first time in my life, unencumbered. It's been almost 40 years since I've interacted with her, what noose will magically cease that hasn't in the 40?  Still, I wait and I believe.  I who does not believe in god or hope, I believe in one free breath before I die. If I live long enough. 

Just under two more years before I'm dead*.  *(physically.  The spiritually and emotionally ships are already sailed.) Just under two more years to become something less an asshole.  It's not looking too promising. 

I have fond memories of childhood, some. Wearing bathing suits under church clothes and then going to the beach directly after. Sitting in the back-back of the station wagon and looking at a disappearing world. Being outside summer nights, mesmerized by my long shadow under the streetlight, moving deliberately from light to light just to watch it elongate and then shorten again. How tall could I become? Catching fireflies at our cousins house. Going to the apple orchard in the fall to pick apples and get fresh squeezed cider. Watching the machine through the long display window making it. Ice skating in the winter.  Playing with neighborhood kids and the mystery of their parents. Lots of football in the street. Hanging out at the creek. It was a different generation, we went out in the morning and came home for dinner, largely unsupervised in between. It wasn't rural, it was suburbs, generic. Lots of memories with my brothers, fewer with my parents; still some were good.

I was a sickly kid.  I threw up a lot and there were many long nights of diarrhea, now a single memory. Me on the toilet, my father sitting opposite me in his robe, waiting.  Never my mother.  In later years I realized he'd had to get up the next morning to go to work, sleepless. Waiting for my ass to explode and empty one last time for the night to wrap. 

I'd had exploratory surgery as an infant to determine the source of my heart murmur. I'd be in my late fifties before my father ever told me he'd had a similar issue and spent 6 months in bed one year in his youth. I asked him what came of it.  He said he got bored and got up. 

But the childhood trauma also happened, the bookends of it and all the moments in between.  Is one stronger than the other?  I carry both, equally.  I think. 

I have a Venn Diagram of stories with a blank space in the convergence field. The absence of any productive life choice whatsoever leaves plenty of time to parse the various sets in search of the sum: me.  I've never had any idea who I am.  Does anyone or am I just laden with narcissism? Still. What am I, if anything, beyond the summation of two sets of genes? Is there a me that isn't them?  I want to know.  

I've been trying to know for years.  It is my life's diligence.  The one. So that for years I excavate and examine, turning over every scrap for a clue, over and over until I find the singular shard that fits into the next fragment.  Many fragments, the work is painstaking, and sometimes it pays off. Like the year I learned everything.  That one is in a museum, it's a magnificent find.

I've carried through my life two activities, painting and riding a bike. And because I live solely to parse the depths of my naval of course that this is is its own curiosity. What of my arrested development hung onto these two items for the duration? Why, what did they do for me that I had to keep them?

I've told the story before. One day deciding I would learn to ride the bike.  I have no memory of bike prior to this day.  I carry no lineage towards it.  Did I ride a bike previously with training wheels?  Did I WANT to ride the bike? 

I was four years old.  It was in the garage. It belonged to one or both of my older brothers.  It rested against the wall. I don't recall them ever riding it. I do recall staring at it.  I don't recall what I thought while doing that. I don't recall having a single concept of what riding a bike was. But I would stand still and look at it. I would do this more than one day, one moment. I would do this. And then, one day, no idea why, it would be that day.  Had I asked to be taught how to do that and turned down? Was I jealous of watching them riding it and being left out? No idea. Me staring at the bike against the wall. 

How did I even know what to do, how to start? I remember going back and forth on the sidewalk in front of the house. I fell, more than once.  A knee bled, something between a scrape and a gash.  I ran inside, my mother put on a band-aid, I went back outside and continued the task.  I learned to ride that bike that day. 

And then no memory more. Not for years. About 10 of them before the Sears Free Spirit. Which I asked for, and maybe even chose? Or did I ask for a bike and it was a Christmas gift?  Again, missing pieces of memory. What made me ask for it?  

We'd just moved from the east coast to California, circa 1975. The bike racks in front of the school were many and laden.  It was definitely to ride to school, so maybe I was simply taking my cue.  I recall no problem reconnecting with how to ride it; it was like riding a bicycle.  But I didn't just ride it to school, I rode it.  Something now understood it could be used beyond the utilitarian. Or maybe what was utilitarian shifted. What are now condos were then lemon fields, and riding through them was magnificent.  Winding around, connecting roads and dots, first generation shards. I still love doing this. With roads and my naval. Poking around to see how things connect. Discovery is a payoff. Stupidly satisfying. 

Four years old, the year of the first bookend of the trauma I would never shake.  I disconnected that day, unanchored. I stopped.  It was the day I knew I was not in a safe space, no one had my back.  Which came first that year, the trauma or the bike?  

I am 61 years old. And maybe I will die in just over two more. I want to finish things, just in case. I want to be able to lay down, finally, in a way I never got to live. I want to know things of a life mostly unknown.  Like what, if anything, I might be separate from their collective 50%'s, and why, in this stumble through a mostly failed life, was I driven to carry with me the two items I did, painting and bike. 

Connecting shards is careful and painstaking, this is not the stuff of haste. Was the bike the first time I understood my own autonomy, me separate from the collective 50%,  me as me? The bike, like painting would come to be, would evolve into the space I got to be me-as-me. Didn't know it then, still learning it now, but something held onto it, something smarter than I ever got around to being. And made sure that space would be bookmarked for me to breathe and exist, outside, beyond, the genetic nightmare. 

 And then I thought, I am misbehaving.

It took four days of tantrums to see it. The first tantrum was a doozy. Lots of back and forth Fuck You's at high decibel. Felt pretty good to give the long simmering, bubbling, steaming, stinky vat of frustration a cleansing. Or to unleash the beast, really.  We all have one.  The Dali Llama and Mother Teresa both. 

Then the moment became a pattern, not as loud and with a much better vocabulary but nonetheless. By the fourth day it was entirely unattractive and now I can't stop. 

There is this thing now, I interact with people. I've not done so for years. So there are surprises. This is a surprise.  I thought I'd better - mastered? - myself.  Or that I was in better command of myself, or that I'd grown up.  Nope.

Reacting to others means I have expectations from others, or it means I have some sense of entitlement of a different outcome, or I have privilege of view. Of course the other person also believes these things but I can't control or change them so how do you not get walked all over while not engaging in any of this? I've never been smart or fast enough, the well thought out comeback occurs me three days later, or the resolution anyway.  

I'm okay with this final frontier, being in command of myself fully, wholly.  I'm not sure I can live long enough to realize it.  It falls into the category of relationships: I never understood their purpose so I can't have one. What are we allowed to expect from this other ever-present thing attached to us? Same with the source of my tantrums.  Is that what being fully realized is - that people can fuck with you and you let it go? Take advantage to no consequence? Walk all over you minus a peep? Punish your ears with error of perception? 

Something in me says, Yes, this is what being grown up is.  Allowing all that, saying nothing, moving on, buttons intact. Living above it. This is exactly what being grown up is.  That I even see it as someone fucking with me is the error.  They are not fucking with me, they are simply Fucks.  Everywhere they go, Fucks. I happen to be in that path, so it's my turn. I can engage them and thus BE them, or not and not. 

then it all was something else

The story, all of it, something else. And still revealing itself.  Interim:

I was on the treadmill after a month not on the treadmill and I plugged into my obsolete iPod and I launched my current gym playlist that is my post-death playlist, after which I will be at a loss. Like, we exhausted death, we'll soon exhaust post-death.  Then what? 

Everything stopped and shifted and in that I'd not been in the gym and I'd not been on the bike which was now a 55-mile ride.  I was engulfed in shift, exhausted in it and owned by it and I forced my way to the gym finally one night, yawing all the way but still there. I pushed play, and it did, it played like a memory and the memory said, Remember who you are.  

What?  

It happened again, and another night again and I had to face something: I'd become. There was this thing beckoning, and this thing was who I became. 

Wha????  When did this happen? 

No means by design, I seem to have stumbled into myself, unwittingly. And into myself is outside of everything else. 

I plugged into my obsolete iPod and launched my post-death playlist and sighed a sigh like I'd just come home after a most long and grueling journey, one I was never wanted to take. I came home and exhaled in post-death.  Who I am.

And I got back on the bike.  

A year ago I walked home from work one late summer evening and I thought: Nice night.  I should go on a bike ride. I did that. I stuck with it, it remained. I was about to celebrate the year of having done that when it all became something else.  I had rides waiting, shifted routes. The miles were there. I was riding out to Playa del Rey every week, and out to the edges of the Valley.  As the rides got longer the hour got later.  When I began the goal was to be off the road before peak bar-emptying hour.  Eventually I was riding through Los Angeles well after they were closed. And it was glorious. Riding down the center of iconic roads, block after block nary a car. It all belonged to me, the night, the moon, the streets, the silence. Mine. And no exhale was more satisfying. 

After a month in something else I plugged into my post-death playlist and it felt like home, and I realized it was. I was never meant to occupy life, only ever death. It took me this long to understand this? To let go.  Because I could never let go. I always wanted to belong, to be liked and loved, to matter, all the confirmations.  I wanted life to accept me. It never did and I lived in this failure, a great and eternal sadness.

There once was a conversation about things like childhood trauma and how does one let go of these things and I never did, I could only ever find something stronger than it to displace it.  I could never let go of life because I'd never found the stronger space to occupy.  Now I have, while, bonus, still breathing. Living in outside of life. 

Sure, I have to continue to subsist in this thing we are all playing at but now with the realization it is not MINE, it has nothing to do with me.  I didn't build this.  I didn't choose this. This doesn't speak to me. I don't understand this story, and in it there is no place for me. 

Never am I more alive than when I am not participating in life, the life we were born to occupy. That script, epic. Never am I more alive than when I am dead. 

I have been living in all this something else for three months now, suspended and waiting to land, not certain where it will be, still already occupying home sweet home.