This Just In: I'm Alive, And It's Terminal

Well it's official. I'm dying.

I shifted my weight atop the parchment paved butchers block, waiting for an explanation, a possible miscommunication, a reason why, or how, or when...I wondered to myself was it worth it? This life. These moments.

My doctor wheeled his chair over, the chart holding the fate of what has become my daily routine balanced under his left arm. I asked him to give it to me straight, the irony in my word-choice settling in only hours later on the ride home. But before he could speak, my brain released, or cleared rather, a kind of wiping clean, as if someone was holding a weighted middle-finger to the delete key.

All my memories, working backward, from the burnt English muffin at breakfast to my first kiss in college, past the failed drivers test, past the prom, freshman year, my best-best friend Susie Blackart, the cabbage-patch kid I smashed into her overhead light in second grade, my first haircut, my last diaper, my mother's smile, the tit, the womb, and then stop. Right there. The moment of conception.

Deception. Life, if you will.

Suddenly, having taken stock of my life's collective meaning, all the anxiety, the stress, the fears of failure, the money worries, the does-he-like-me-like-me's, they had no consequence, no more power, no more hold. I was free, free to die.

My career crystallized, my mortgage materialized, and through these new eyes, I saw the truth, the meaning, the gift of life itself.

I was excited in that moment to take what remained of my days on earth for granted, to exploit my ability to walk upright, to flaunt my fevered appreciation for the capability to breath, to digest, to eat corn and flush corn, to smile at strangers, to compliment coworkers, to enjoy the laughter of a child and pity the tears of an invalid.

I never felt more alive than in the moment I was prepared to die.

But that's when he said it. You're going to be just fine. And suddenly that moment faded, my eyes gravitated back to his and I felt the blinking cursor paused in my beating brain. Control-Alt-Delete and I was rebooted, reborn, but back in the same body, the same worries, the same old context and constructs. Yeah, I was alive and well.

Damn it.

For shits-and-giggles, or perhaps from the remnants of the old-new-me I asked him how much longer I had to live. He said a lifetime. Give or take. I calculated in my head what that meant, trying desperately to account for fleeting time, to get back to that high, that freedom-filled fantastic fate.

Fuck.

If I live to be 80, from dust to dust, I've been given 4,160 weeks. Having used a third of that already, I'm down to 2,800.

Twenty-eight-hundred weeks. That's all I have to live. Give or take.

Yet it means nothing until the man in a white coat presses his weight against my knees and tells me I'm a goner. We wait, I suppose, to hear the deathly diagnosis. But we're all infected, we're all already goners, from the get go. There will be no survivors from this disease, and no cure.

Only memories, while they last. Only a hundred and eight second chances to become the person whose life is worth erasing. Only four thousand weeks to attempt something new, if you haven't already, and two thousand weeks to remember them.

Yes, I am dying, officially. But oh, what a good time I'll have doing it.