If I Had Died

While on a death path in 2004, I couldn’t have guessed how much more was yet to come. At the time, I would have said I’ll miss Momma X, my friends, my business, music, my interests--sex--all the obvious stuff, but no telling what the future had in store. That’s what’s so intriguing about this topic when it comes to my world and what has happened since. These ensuing years have been a gift that came with my new liver. Seems I burned the first one out badly.

When first diagnosed with cancer, I shut down my antiques gallery and had a big sale, discounted all prices (it IS all about money) and nearly sold out my entire stock. Up for grabs were classical and tribal art objects from all over the world. These were the real McGillas, not reproductions, but genuine artifacts from prehistoric times through Egyptian, Greek and Roman and pre-Columbian. The African, Oceanic and Asian pieces I carried often hailed from later periods, but were just as compelling, just as artistically relevant.    

After some months of increasing physical complications, the phone call came while having dinner one Sunday night. Pasta with parsley, butter, olive oil and garlic. There was a liver available. It came as quite a shock. It wasn’t supposed to happen so soon. Confused, I asked if I could finish my linguine. After all, even though I was deteriorating, I was still fourth on the list in my blood type. It was a fortunate turn for me, however unfortunate for the three patients listed above me, those who weren’t healthy enough to endure the operation at the time.

If I had died, I would have missed the year of Interferon/Ribavirin chemotherapy for one thing. That was one of my more physically and emotionally draining times. When I took that shot of Interferon on Friday, I could figure on being in the fetal position the next three days, wracked with pain. I’d come back to the real world for a few days, only to do it all over again the following Friday. It’s like getting into a knockdown, drag-out fight every week--winning the fight, but then having to fight again next week, and the week after, and then the week after that. I developed a hernia during that year, but they couldn’t operate while I was on treatment. For six months, my guts would pop out, and I’d push ‘em back. Trusses.  … Ghaaaad. … Grinds on a guy.

That year, my mind became too addled to create, but my appreciation (and collection of) jazz took a giant leap, and I got a prescription for a certain medicinal herb. Wheee! Started growing my own. Started supplying the first LEGAL dispensary in California. Became the local go-to guy for the lowdown on outdoor cultivation.

Momma X had endured, nursed me, and brought me back to health. I didn’t want her to have to deal with our personal art collection if I were to croak. So we decided to sell the artifacts I had appropriated over the years. Pieces that spoke to us. While in business, I had three criteria for keeping a piece of art:

1        1-    Must be compelling to us, outstanding in a collection of similar objects.

2        2-    Must be small. We live in a house with under 1000 sq. ft. floor space.

3        3-    It had to cost nothing, or next to nothing.

Our financial situation never allowed us to buy as collectors. I could sometimes keep an item from a group purchase if we liked it, making up the difference with sales of the other piece. Sometimes I’d find something at a flea market or antique shop at a great price.  That’s one reason I went into business in the first place; I like turning my hobbies into businesses.

The personal collection sale enabled Momma to retire a year early.

If I had died:

I wouldn’t have built my inventory again. I wouldn't have rented a space in an antique mall, wouldn’t have done a few more big shows (enough to let me know I wasn’t getting any younger) or that one last exhibit at the internationally recognized Santa Fe Ethnographic Show (a ‘comeback’ show after seven years absence).

I wouldn’t have had open heart surgery for a triple bypass two weeks later.

I wouldn’t have started writing erotica in 2009.

I wouldn’t have taken a trip to Paris.

I wouldn’t have stayed at my friend’s new B&B in the far north of Thailand. Twice! I went there when he first opened, then again with Momma X two years later. I wouldn’t have known the Thai people, how accommodating they are. It’s really nice to be in a place where people are nice. The Thais are tolerant to the point of putting up with silly old men who search for lost youth, then find it again in that wondrous land.

I wouldn’t have had to endure the grief of a brother’s suicide.

I wouldn’t have attended my 50^th high school reunion.

I wouldn’t be nursing Momma back to health after her recent operation. The incision didn’t heal right and we’ve been repacking it every day for over a month now.

I wouldn’t have had my first submission anywhere, anytime, anyplace, accepted for an erotic anthology. (Not that I’ve had anything accepted since). I wouldn’t have had something chosen for the ERWA gallery every month now for seventeen months in a row. I wouldn’t have eleven pieces featured in the ERWA Treasure Chest, best of 2012, ranging from poetry to flashers to quickies and short stories.

I wouldn’t be ERWA’s Flasher editor six months a year. (Back in the driver’s seat again this July)

And I wouldn’t have been invited to this prestigious OGG blogspot.

The richness of life comes at us in all forms; may we recognize what we have while we have it. One measure of our quality of life is in how we handle what comes.

My kittens-bringer of all things comforting

There are so many things I would miss if I were no longer here—my children, my granddaughter, my friends. At my age and stage in life I have accumulated so many things that are special and important to me that to pick just one was very difficult. But…I’d have to say my kittens.

My three adorable four-footed children came to live with us in 2004, just after Nefertiti, our wonderful cat, had passed away at the age of 17. Our house was so empty. All our children are out in the adult world and without Kitty the rooms seemed so empty. We finally decided we needed another little bundle of fur but somehow between home and the animal rescue shelter we ended up with three instead of one—Grace (the alpha cat), Bast (who challenges Nefertiti) and Blanca who has her own very unique personality.

From the first night in our house they slept on the bed with us, curled in a ball, bringing to us unqualified love and acceptance. It’s true cats rule but they also love unconditionally and so it was with these three.

Nearly four years ago my husband became ill and was bedridden for the last six months of his life. Bast, our tiny black kitten, sent nearly every day curled up on the pillow next to him, guarding his spirit and infusing him with love. When he passed away she began sleeping on his pillow.

And in the time since then my cats have filled a big void in my house, my life, and my heart. During the day they have their individual habits but Bast usually spends her time with me at my computer. She sits on my desk, lying on one of my t-shirts, or on my lap (making it difficult to type!) and sometimes even draped over my arms. 

When I sit in my big arm chair to watch television I have a cat in my lap and one draped over each arm of the chair.

And at night when I get into bed, they are right there with me, all three, cuddled against me, purring and assuring me that I am not alone as long as they are with me. Some nights that’s all that gets me through the dark hours.

So while I’d miss many, many things, my cats have to top the list. They live in my heart as I do in theirs.

Be sure to visit me online and tell me all about things you'd miss or your favorite pet stories.

@desireeholt

www.facebook.com/desireeholtauthor

Not the Cheeriest Post You'll Read

Sacchi Green

I wrote the last part of this post first, but it was so depressing that I thought I’d better stick closer to this week’s actual topic first. What will I miss when I’m dead?

Well, playing along with the assumption that that could happen, I’ve given it some serious thought. Not sex, I think, because I hope to live so long that I will already have come to terms with missing sex, at least the way it used to be. So far (and I’m pretty sure I’m the oldest one here) my sex life is still fine, with some adjustments. Spontaneity is pretty much out, but we find that it works well to plan a specific time each week (Sunday morning, as it happens—Hi Lily Harlem!) unless health or some other factor interferes. That way there’s no wondering whether the other party is really in the mood, just knowing that we can almost always get in the mood if we try.

Giselle’s post about growing things come close. I’m lucky to have room for a garden, both flowers and vegetables, and plenty of woodland around me for moderate hiking (when my joints will cooperate.) I raise seedlings under lights in the early spring and then plant them outdoors when the weather’s right, and enjoy giving away my extras to friends and family. Growing things is a link to the greater sphere of life that means a great deal to me.

I’m also lucky to have, miraculously it sometimes seems, a granddaughter, and I’m already missing the way she was at every age she’s already been on the way to her current seven years old.

But what I’ll miss most isn’t a thing, or an activity, so much as an abstract feeling. Call it the sense of having a future. I don’t feel old, but I do realize that I have a whole lot more past now than future, and I’ll miss having one, miss still being a part of the continuing world. I’ll miss seeing what comes next. Although, from what I’ve seen lately of aging and death, I’m afraid that by that time I won’t really care what comes next.

Which brings me to the really depressing part. Fair warning.      

I sincerely hope that I’m not capable of missing anything after death. I had read about Sam Parnia and his book “Erasing Death”, as Garceus has discussed, and it absolutely terrified me. I’ve been putting off dealing with this topic, but it’s probably just as well to face up to it and move on.

Three months ago I had the main responsibility for the funeral arrangements for my 92-year-old mother. My 93-year-old father had the right to final decisions, but he turned to me for most of it. He’d long ago been clear about preferences for himself, but my mother had wanted to leave it to us, and of course we couldn’t press her to make decisions, especially since she was declining mentally as well as physically.

The funeral itself was lovely. My mother was very musical; I wish she could have heard the wonderful soloist singing the Pie Jesu from Faure’s Requiem. Other than that, though, the idea of the consciousness sticking around while the body decays (or is otherwise disposed of; my father wants to be cremated, and my mother always wanted to be with him, so we did make that arrangement so that they could share a space) doesn’t bear thinking of. But of course I’ve been thinking of it. It’s probably fortunate that I didn’t read about “Erasing Death” until after the interment, although I’d already been trying to ignore “what if…” thoughts along those lines.

So there you go. Question answered to the best of my ability. Even though I wouldn’t have minded missing it. Let’s see, what’s next? Movies! Okay, I can cope.

 

Hello and What I'll Miss - Lily Harlem

Photograph by David Woolfall

Hey, it’s great to be here. I’m new to Oh Get A Grip! and really looking forward to getting to know you all. If you want to find out a little more about me and my work then I have a shiny new author  link (just on the right) to my website that has all the gossip about my erotic romance novels.

It sounds a bit of a morbid theme going on as I dip my feet into the OGAG! pond for the first time. Things I’ll miss… when dead! But actually, as I started thinking about it I realized that it was a good opportunity to pause and reflect on all the things I really do adore and appreciate in my life.

Without having to say it – though I will – my family of course mean everything to me and I can’t even begin to imagine not being with them. But to ponder on other things I’ll miss. Mmm… here goes…

Stories – not just writing them and reading them but also watching stories on TV or at the cinema. Chatter too, with friends, gossip, tales of wild adventures or just hearing about what other people are doing in their lives, the highs and lows, the challenges and conflicts. Maybe I’m nosy at heart, but I do enjoy immersing myself in the goings on of other peoples lives be it fictional or real.

Smells – I have a very acute sense of smell which is a blessing and a bind. Generally though it’s something I enjoy very much. The scent of herbs is one of my favourite, basil in particular. I also adore being around horses and the aroma of leather and saddle cleaner, a horse’s mane and freshly mown hay are all things I love and make me feel right at home. Also takes me back to my childhood, those farmyard scents.

Sunshine – Blue skies and fluffy clouds, a great orb of heat, oh, I love summer. The British summer gets a bad reputation but when the heavens gets it right, it is just perfect. I’ll miss the colours of a summer’s day more than anything else, my very favourite combination is in a view at the end of my lane. Picture this in horizontal layers - a white-golden sun hanging in a clear, vibrant blue sky, next a vivid yellow field of oilseed rape and then finally a lush green hedgerow dotted with buttery wild flowers. I’ll miss that scene, each spring when the crop is in full bloom I always pause and top up my memory.

Sukie – my old dog, though I think she’ll be gone before me and it will be me missing her for real. She’s a rescue dog and I’ve had her for years. Not sure what her history is, but she must have been abandoned at some point as she doesn’t let me out of her sight. She really is my shadow and constant companion, she is also  completely non-judgmental and not one for having an opinion on every single thing – I appreciate that, a  lot.

Sunday Morning – The best part of the week. Why? Because on a Sunday Mr Harlem is not at work! We get the newspapers delivered early, make a big pot of tea and lounge in bed catching up and generally having quiet, us time with no disturbances. If the phone goes we leave it, the doorbell too. Mmm, I love Sunday mornings.

I’ve just realised that all of the things I’ll miss begin with S – I wonder what that means? Sad to see them go, So happy they're all in my life? I don't know...

So what about you all, tell me what you’ll miss the most.

Lily x

Oh, and do check out my links. Feel free to friend me, follow me or hang out on Pinterest/Goodreads with me. Hope to see you there.

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A Makeshift Garden

by Giselle Renarde

I have a makeshift garden.

I rent an apartment in the city, and over the past ten years I've accumulated nine containers on my balcony.  That's my makeshift garden. It's not ideal, but it's better than nothing.

When I a kid, my father always kept a vegetable garden.  In fact, one of my first memories is getting a nasty splinter in my foot from one of the rotting wooden beams that marked the boundary.  Every year, my parents would "do down" countless tomatoes, which seemed like a frightening ordeal--all that peeling red skin and tomato guts, mason jars and bubbling water in giant cauldrons.

I can't remember what else we grew.  The tomatoes stand out in my mind.

Digging in the dirt has always been one of my favourite activities.  When I was little, I dug my hands deep down in the soil, searching for worms.  I wasn't happy unless I was dirty.  Now that I don't have a patch of earth to call my own, it's the thing I most covet.  I want to dig and disturb.  I want to play in the earth.  It's hard to do that in a container garden.

But, again, it's better than nothing.  There are moments when I'm weeding or dead-heading, or planting seeds, or noticing for the first time that something's started to germinate and it's poking its little green head out into the great big world... moments of utter perfection.  I've never experienced heaven like that doing anything else.  It's a feeling I've only ever had while gardening.

And it's fleeting.  It lasts only a moment.  A spark of perfect pleasure that grows out of the earth, fills me with bliss, then dissipates into thin air and is gone.

The End of All That

She withdrew her fingers from his mouth. She sighed. "I know you have a question now you want to ask me."

"Great lady," he whispered. "What is it like? To be dead?"

Cool hands moved in the dark and found his right hand. She lifted it and placed it snugly between her warm thighs. “Its not so different, really.” She squeezed his hand with her thighs. “A sleeping person wants to sleep. A dying person wants to die.”

“Tell me.”

“I don’t want to.”

“But can you love, if you are dead?”

“Love is only a cloud hiding the color of the moon,” she said, and kissed his ear. “Love is a fog, Shoji-chan. It hides the true nature of things, until it burns away.”   

                                      Lady Dainagon and Shoji  from "The Color of the Moon" 

I’ve often suspected that my little town has a force field around it.  Violent storms never seem to come here.  You see them on the Doppler radar map as a marching battle line of menacing red blobs that have just killed people in the next state over , but when they get close invariably a hole appears, they break into chunks that move above and below my little town and then reassemble over South Carolina and burst once again into tornadoes.

I do miss them.  I like to watch lightning storms in my little back yard with my skinny peach tree and my garden.  In the evening it’s where I come to dream.

I can hear the storms rumble over on the other side of the Savannah tearing up Edgefield County, a kind of meteorological whipping boy that takes all our beatings while I sit in the back regarding the distant mayhem with a small whisky glass of mead.   Most people have never heard of mead, I’m currently teaching myself how to brew it in case I can go pro someday when I retire.  Mead is fermented honey, probably the oldest booze known to our species.  When you see pictures of Vikings and warriors in Valhalla drinking from animal horns, mead is what they’re drinking.  The mead I make is about 20%-30% alcohol, I’ve got that part figured out, so I drink in respectful small amounts.

I watch the lightning and mull over a scene I’m writing for a story, trying to think how to describe what I see.  I know what lightning is, a negative charge connecting with a positive charge, the explosion of sound as super heated air breaking the sound barrier, I know all that.  But I liked it better when I didn’t know.

One of the characteristics of our time is that we know so much that sounds like sorcery, but isn’t as much fun as real sorcery.  Lightning was more fun when all we had was the mystery of it.  Vikings in their dragon boats or tending their cattle, or maybe getting wasted on mead, could imagine that Thor – or Donner as the Germans called him in their operas – would put down his drinking horn, pick up his war hammer and whack something or someone really, really hard and make that god like display of wanton excessive power that set forests on fire.  The world at one time was filled with magic.  Thor and his hammer.  Zeus and his lightning bolts.  Capricious god’s blessing and destroying at will and whim, sometimes for no reason at all.  Gods you could talk to.  Gods you could cut a deal with.

The old caves in France that go back 50,000 years or more show human beings morphing into animals, animals as supernatural beings.  The world of the spirit and the world of matter were the same, existing side by side and constantly bleeding over into each other.

As a mystic, I tend towards the kabalistic view of the world and God which says that God is the only reality there is.  There is no God and creation, but only God existing on many levels of reality simultaneously, a surface with deeper levels of structure like an onion, or a stack of Russian dolls.  I hold up my hand with my little glass of mead.  A physicist will tell you my hand is mostly made of empty space, atoms with cosmic distances in between.  Move up a little, and the atoms become organic molecules.  Chemical compounds mixed with carefully controlled electrical currents.  A little higher and the chemicals become organisms, tissue cells and bacteria that live and die, attacking and killing.  Nine out of ten cells in your body mass are bacteria, not tissue cells.  About 3 to 4 pounds of your body weight when you step on a scale is the weight of bacteria living inside and out of you.  Seen from that level you are not a person, you are a colonial super organism, a vast moving forest of plants and animals living symbiotically with individual tissue cells working cooperatively to form the operations of your body including consciousness.  Even consciousness, ninety percent of that too is operating outside of your reach, out of sight of what you think of as “yourself.”  

I love knowing these things, which I take on faith as much as any religion.  And yet.  There was a time I believed in angels, when the whole thing seemed impossible and mysterious.  Like seeing a ghost in front of you.  It can’t be, it doesn’t make sense, but there it is.  Our age is the stripping away of mysteries and finding answers that only provoke more mysteries.

The only mystery left is death.

We still don’t know what happens when we die.  We know what death looks like.  We can monitor the heart, scan the brain activity until it ceases and things begin to cool down.  “He’s dead, Jim.” 

Sam Parnia, in his book “Erasing Death” describes his medical work resuscitating people who have just gone past the clinical point of death in the short window before the body begins to break down.  He’s kind of the medical equivalent of a storm chaser, arriving on the scene just after someone has died.  People who have had an experience of life after death are rarer than you think, but they’re out there.  They’re rare because there is now a clinically recognized standard that defines death to a scientist and what it means to be brought back when you’ve crossed over that definition.  He makes an interesting statement in his work – if roughly 1 out of nearly 1000 people remembers experiencing consciousness after all function in the brain has ceased and the brain has been inert meat for several seconds or even minutes, and then been resuscitated with that experience intact – and there are plenty of these people -  it means that our fundamental ideas about consciousness are wrong.  It at least raises the question that consciousness could briefly exist independently of the brain and whatever that implies.

I’ll be a little sad when that gets figured out.

I’d hate to think that my last thought on earth will be “Oh.  I see.  So that’s all it is.  Okay.”

"Miss you" isn't enough

Sorry, this is a bit late - I usually post this Monday night in order to deal with the time vagaries of our membership - however last night I was struck down by 'orrible pains in my stomach. Phil, my partner, took me to the emergency clinic where we sat for ages - something I definitely will not miss when I pop it, although there probably isn't a need for an ER on the other side.
What I will miss though is the love and concern shown by Phil as I sat moaning, and he trying to comfort me.

I left home when I was very young, the stereotypical wide-eyed innocent gaping at the wonders of the big city, easy prey for those who like to eat kids for breakfast. It would have been so easy to have become just another missing kid, especially considering some of the places where I bedded down for the night.

But that didn't happen. There's a chain of tiny restaurants in London called 'The Stockpot' and it was there that I met Peter - you had to share tables at The Stockpot. Peter told me he was on his way to interview for a front of house job at the Adelphi Theatre. "Why don't you come along too?" he said, after I told him I was looking for a job.So I did, we both got the jobs and Peter and I became firm friends and occasional lovers.

Through that one chance meeting my life led me in a direction I had never envisaged. I met people who were actually in the business of show and when they found out I had a voice, encouraged me to audition for producers. I spent 12 years in that business, met some incredible people - and I'm happy to say that most of them are still my friends today. We might be separated by miles and oceans but we've kept in touch throughout the years. Sadly, some have gone, and that is what I now miss, and will always miss - their company - the laughter, the shared secrets, the reaching out to comfort in bad times.

Friends, good friends are hard to come by. A loving partner even harder. I was reminded of that last night, and thanked my lucky stars, that as rotten as I felt - and no doubt looked - Phil was by my side. I don't want to think of when we may no longer be together, somehow I don't think the word 'miss' would encompass what I would truly feel