Time

For those that don't know, I'm on hospice. In researching it, I found out that in order to go on hospice, you have to be deemed terminally ill, with a life expectancy of fewer than six months. Well, I just passed eight months, and have no intention of proving them right about the terminal part. 

I believe that life is a mystery. Nobody can tell you when you are going to die. If they do, and they are somehow right, it is the result of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Only God can tell you when your life on this earth is finished. Everything else is just a guess. I choose to live my life as though I'm not leaving anytime soon. 

I think that when you stop believing in your future, that is when you die. I fill my days loving, laughing, and learning. I don't do it because I have to, I do it because I want to. And because it is what I would do even if I wasn't confined to this bed. This bed and my condition don't define me. Nor do a room full of doctors!

When we are little, still under our parent's thumbs, we can't wait for the passage of time. To bring us to the next milestone of our lives, and one step closer to what the world considers an adult. Truth is, we never really grow up, we only start acting like what we believe an adult should act like. But when we think Nobody is looking, or when we are drunk, or when we are with certain friends, with whom we feel a certain level of comfort, our immature comes out. 

Our milestones are ones we impose or are imposed by society. There's our first day of school when we get our first day of separation from the only adults who held sway over our lives. Then there's turning ten, double digits. When you turn 13, a teenager at last. When you turn 16 now you can drive, or at least you used to be able to, I don't know how it works now. There's turning 18, you become an adult, in some respects, but you still have to wait to get all the perks of adulthood. And finally, there's 21, a full-fledged adult. You have finally earned all the rights and responsibilities of being an adult. Congratulations! It seemed like it was taking forever to get here, next thing you know, you blink, and you find yourself in your sixties. 

You spend the first 21 years of your life, wishing you were older, then the rest of your life, wishing you were younger. A cruel joke really. By the time you think you've got life all figured out, it's almost over. Dad said something to me about it, but I was young and dumb. I know how he felt back then, my kids don't want to listen to me either. Like me, they think they've got it all figured out. They'll learn like I did, the hard way. 

I saw a picture of my wife and me, dressed in some hideous outfits that I can't remember owning, much less ever wearing. We looked like we were getting ready to be extras, in some bad eighties-themed music video. Neither my wife, nor I could remember having taken that photo, or why we were dressed that way. My little girl sure got a laugh. But you would think because the outfit and hairdos were so bad, that we would easily recall the moment. Instead, we found ourselves doing our best Sherlock Holmes, and looking for clues that might tell us when the photo had been taken. A lost fragment of time. How many more were there? Photo evidence, yet it was a lost moment.