This past Friday I was diagnosed with emphysema, which scares me more than words can say. God has been extremely generous in giving me opportunity after opportunity (after opportunity) to quit smoking so I really can't blame anyone but myself for the fact I am facing a scary, and quite possibly short, future. I don't have any right to be angry and so I'm not... not at God anyway. I'm plenty angry at myself, of course.

My first thought is for my children. I'm a single parent ~ have been for 21 years. I've always put them before everything and everyone else... so why not before cigarettes? What the FUCK was so damn wonderful about inhaling a stick of tobacco that made me choke and cough up gross shit? I used to tell myself it was "relaxing." How could I have been so stupid???? Let me tell you, there isn't anything relaxing about being 39 and scared to death you're gonna die. My daughters were--ARE--worth more than this. As a mother, and especially a single mother, I have failed them. That is the worst epiphany of them all.

From the perspective of an individual human, the fear of death haunts me for other reasons too. Namely, I don't know what, if anything, happens next. I believe in God ~ I truly do ~ but I don't believe in the religions that have been created around Him. Every religious person believes theirs is the true religion and that all others will burn in hell. They can't all be right. (More to the point, they're all probably wrong.) So what happens next? Nobody really knows. Many think they know, but no one truly does.

Just as frightening to me is the very real possibility that absolutely nothing happens next. I've had plenty of non-religious people tell me they hope there is nothingness after this life, that they simply cease to exist. All I can say to that is why? What the hell is the point of being a thinking, feeling creature if this is it? 

Freud said that humans invented religion because we are too egotistical to conceive of a world without us in it. Perhaps that's true. When it comes right down to it my worst fear of them all is being forgotten... by my children, my parents, my friends, and my family. Hell by the world at large. But mostly by my children. The thought of them forgetting my smile, my laugh, my hugs, my lasagne... it's more than I can bear to contemplate.

It always comes back to my daughters, as it should. And for that reason, I am choosing from here on out to make better choices. I am choosing to stand up and fight rather than lay down and die. I am choosing to LIVE which is something I haven't done in a long, long time. Nobody really knows when it's going to be over until it is, but I won't be helping death along anymore. Maybe I'll live another 40 minutes, maybe another 40 years. Either way, I'm going to live.

"I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs."  ~ Frederick Douglass, escaped slave