thoughts percolating

[rm]

But, instead of telling you them, I have a poll.

What's your relationship to death/Death (capitalization as you prefer)?
Please share any thoughts you have about gender as connected with that.

Thnx.

Comments

[schpahky.livejournal.com]

I have no gender associations with death. I have very little theoretical grounding in death, either; it's something that happens to everyone at one point or another, fairly or not. The dying is harder for me than the death. I say that having lost my grandmother at 91, my friend Dave at 38, my alcoholic aunt at 52, and my mother's best friend at 44 (who had a son with MS who died at 19 a few years later). My family is riddled with cancer and I assume that my own body may turn on me someday.

I am more afraid of not making peace with reality than I am of dying. Having said that, I am sometimes pinioned by a sense of time running out, and it swallows my ability to create the life I want. I am more convinced though that this has to do with my upbringing than with death.

Only when I turned 30 did I realize I never expected to live that long. I can't rationally explain why I felt that way, but it's most of why the current state of my life happened so quickly and critically.

I have also many times been the bearer of things people don't wish to acknowledge, and that has put me in a peculiar place when people are going through their own stuff. I don't deny them as they have me. Sometimes I think my capacity to hold others' pain keeps me on a certain threshold. That sounds like romanticism perhaps, and it happens more with acquaintances than with close friends. But I have just assumed it to be part of my interaction with the world at large.

There is also a migraine/death continuum but I need to think about that.