Life these days
I hope I make it to my deadline. Last night, Wednesday night, this column was due but I forgot all about it. You see, I am GROWING OLD, AFFLICTED WITH senior moments and times of deep personal transitions. This is one of those times when all those current
Ihope I make it to my deadline . Last night, Wednesday night, this column was due but I forgot all about it. You see, I am growing
old, afflicted with senior moments and times of deep personal transitions. This is one of those times when all those currents are warring within me.
On the most obvious level, I have a terrible hacking cough that when it attacks feels like something in me will snap and I will drop dead. I have been to the doctor, have been declared safe from walking pneumonia and other similar terrors; have gotten medicines, which I take faithfully, still the cough is there, getting looser, I am told by the lady who comes to give me a massage one day and to clean my apartment on another. I hope so because I don’t want to die from this cough. I really need to stop thinking I might.
Then I must thank everyone who responded to last week’s article. I received some good advice and insights, which I am pursuing in spite of my horrible cough, and I am also learning a few lessons. Do not make appointments with insistent people you don’t know. They never come on time. What do you expect? They are Filipinos. They make a 4 p.m. appointment with you and at 4:15 p.m. you call them and find out they are stuck in traffic at a market in Caloocan and you are in Makati. Well, I’m sorry, I said. As a matter of principle I am always on time. I will not wait that long for you.
This year also I realized that I am getting old. And this week I decided to begin setting my affairs in order. Going through my house I realized I have many things that really belong to one of my daughters, the one who lives in San Francisco. If I should die, it may be included in the division of my property and not go to her children. I have them because when her apartment in the city was sold I decided to take them to keep for her children. Now I decide to give it to her only son who lives here with instructions that they are for him and his brothers and sister.
This morning as I prepared the furniture to move, I kissed them with love. They will go to their destination, where they were destined to go. I remembered her when she was involved in the making or the choosing of the furniture. She was young then and very involved in the design and very happy to discover how well she did that. That is the emotion that I hope goes with her furniture, that she passes on to her children. I am passing those emotions on in her behalf.
This includes the bed I have been sleeping on for many years now. Starting tonight I will be sleeping on my landlord’s bed that comes with my apartment. It is bigger and it is not mine but never mind. We will become friends, this bed and I. Then my apartment will divide into two rooms – my bedroom and my office and I will be happier instead of having two bedrooms, the other one always empty, without guests. And I need not
an office but what I will call my atelier, a room where I will make my costume jewelry, which I sell on etsy.com and on my site in FaceBook.
By July 1 my home will be fixed and my life will be new, I tell my only home companion, a single lizard. Let me tell you, I am afraid of lizards and the few times we meet, we scare each other half to death. But I know where he lives, on a small table near my front door. He doesn’t go up on the ceiling because it
has a stucco-finish and he cannot cling so late at night he prowls and leaves his turds on the wall for me to cringe over and clean with paper napkins. I dislike him tremendously because I don’t like lizards. Why am I restraining myself? I hate lizards ever since I was small and my cousin sent me to the bathroom with a dead lizard between me and the door and I got hysterical until one of the maids rescued me.
But this one is the only other living thing in my apartment at night. We live together and I like it that way. He will
probably find me first when I die, if I die according to my script. Oh, to those of you who felt bad for me when I said I wanted to die alone, please don’t feel bad. I really want to enjoy death alone, not distracted by the tears of my children or whoever else loves me and doesn’t want me to go. Death is a beautiful experience and I would love to go through that alone, not worried or concerned about other people. Just enjoy it by myself and take the memory of it with me.
Okay, I need to get dressed and ready for the furniture pick up and the seminar I asked to attend, before I got besieged by this horrible cough. I hope I can still make my deadline.
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