Your Dying Spouse 498 - The Three-Foot World.{FMF}

So people sometimes say...heck, even Barbara sometimes says..."I don't know how you do it."

With cancer taking over body and life...how do you do it?

It's pretty easy, really. I just take the next step, and the furthest ahead I look is the next cigar. (Cigars help a lot in fighting pain and nausea. Plus, they make me feel Churchillian.)

If I looked at the map that lies before me, of more pain and more debility and more fatigue and what I am coming to see will be a really painfully nasty death, I'd fold.

 "...if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee." - Friedrich Nietzsche

In rock climbing, it's called the Three-Foot World. Your life depends on what's within three feet of you. Anything else, the climb above and the long fall below...they're irrelevant.

So today isn't even the key. It's that next cigar, on the other side of taking care of the dogs, and taking care of the laundry, and taking care of Barbara (a joy!), and participating in the blogosphere.

You can get through a lot of pain in anticipation of tobacco, and a chance to rest.

Or whatever. If I could still drink coffee, it would be coffee.

Or...far better...Glenlivet. But that is a part of another story.

The harder question is why. I hope for a miracle, but the prospect laid out before me is both bleak and grim, and that should be where despair lives.

I haven't left the property since the 2016 election, when I voted. It doesn't look like I'll be leaving again. Well, once more, geddit?

And it's getting so much worse; walking is hard (and a just-broken foot...I mean, REALLY?...doesn't help), eating is an ordeal, I haven't slept in a few nights...yeah, whine, whine, whine.

But despair doesn't live here. Maybe I'm delusional.

Nah. To be delusional, you have to be pretty smart, have an imagination. People who know and love me say, kindly, that I'm dumber than a box of rocks.

Someone very dear has said that when she watches Guardians Of The Galaxy, this scene reminds her, irresistibly, of me...

I've said that service is a large part of the reason, being able to help Barbara and the dogs, and to give encouragement to my friends. And that's true, but it doesn't go far enough.

Why, when I'm feeling up to it, do I still work on a novel I'll never finish, or build parts for an aeroplane I'll never fly?

It's that Three Foot World, again.

It's the process that's important; it took me a long time to learn this. I will never see the destination after which I chased, but no matter. The destination was a metaphor.

I now now that the destination I sought was God, in everything I did. In fighting, in flying, in life.

And I'm already there.

Over to John Fogerty, with Lodi.

Please pardon my slow response to comments. I do my best, and your comments are really precious to me. Barb is answering many of them now. I'm running on fumes, if you don't mind a macho metaphor.

I'm grateful for the energy to have written this. I'm so glad Barbara's stepped in for many of my posts. I'm really not doing well at all.

Thanks to Carol Ashby, Blessed Are The Pure Of Heart is back on Kindle, and will be available in paperback soon.

Friends are everything. I couldn't have done it.

Marley update... been moved to a sanctuary, and Bay County will revise their 'dangerous dog' codes.

WE MADE A DIFFERENCE!

And marley has a Facebook page! Please drop by to see how happy he is today.

If you can, please do leave a comment. I am trying to answer all, and I am failing, but please know this - I read and treasure each one.

Below are my recent releases on Kindle -please excuse their presence in the body of the blog. I haven't the energy to get them up as 'buttons' in the sidebar. You can click on the covers to go to the Amazon links.