Comes the smiling mortician

"Yes the world is the best place of all
for a lot of such things as
making the fun scene
and singing low songs and having inspirations
and walking around
looking at everything
and smelling flowers
and goosing statues
and even thinking
and kissing people and
making babies and wearing pants
and waving hats and
dancing
and going swimming in rivers
on picnics
in the middle of the summer
and just generally
'living it up'
Yes
but then right in the middle of it
comes the smiling
mortician"

-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti 

Living creatures are fragile. You'd think that living in a town that's the only place on earth where several species live, and where floods and droughts seem to occasionally accelerate the cycle of life and death, would make this more obvious, but sometimes I'm still surprised by it.

I've had a few reasons lately to think about this gossamer mortal coil that grows more delicate every day. Last week a friend's father died -- a man I was fortunate enough to know when I was a little girl. He was a college professor, a perfect profession for a wise and wonderful person whose light should be spread across the world. The biggest consolation is that his son, my friend, is a wonderful expression of that light, and so it shines on. 

The next day, I found out I have to get a colonoscopy. There's no concern about cancer, but my stomach has been so messed up for so long that dozens of diagnoses are possible -- maybe just IBS, maybe Crohn's, maybe something more, and I'd be lying if I said I weren't nervous about it. I'm trying to focus on the fact that it's not as serious as a surgery, and that I will basically get to do a colon cleanse for much less money than I'd pay for the same thing at a spa, but there's the lingering "what if" in the back of my mind that I hope will leave once the anaesthetics kick in. 

And for the past week or so, I've noticed my eldest cat, Tom, has not been eating like usual. He usually loses his appetite to some degree when the weather gets hot, but he's also been spitting up a little bit pretty frequently and I think he's lost some weight over the past month. He has an appointment with the nice ladies at the vet's office on Friday. I'm hoping maybe it's something as simple as a hairball blockage, but I'm worried they might find something seriously wrong with my old man (he's about 13, so if he were a human he'd be almost 70 years old ... which still seems too young to die). 

St. Francis, who loved animals and
just about everyone else

And yet amid all of this, the party of life goes on. Everyone wakes up every day, the sun rises, the river flows, babies are born, families have barbecues, lovers reunite, I still get up and drink tea and laugh and smile and have brunch with friends, the universe keeps churning, because all of these things that feel like the end of the world are just a part of life. We're born to break. It's what we do despite the delicate condition of mortality, what we do before we break irreparably, that makes the whole struggle worthwhile. 

I recently re-encountered one of my favorite quotes from Charles Bukowski:

"We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing."

And I try to remember that -- to not get terrorized by trivialities, to not freak out about a diagnostic procedure, to not look at my elder kitty as a furry pile of symptoms instead of a living creature I love. And I try to let the fragility of life motivate me to love more, and to live more, rather than to curl up and hide away from the inevitable. Which leads me to another quote from Bukowski:

"We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us."

May we all do just that -- may Death tremble to take us all.