Now I'm moving through my mind ideas
that I DO NOT want to see in my obituary. Oh. Feel free to enter your
outrage here. Go ahead. Take a few minutes. “What kind of pompous
ass thinks we'd even care.” “Controlling to the end, huh Arnold?”
“Are you TRYING to make people feel uncomfortable, or is that just
a side effect of your free range ego?”
OK. My turn. First off, it's now 5 am.
You really think this is the time of night when fairy dust fills the
air and you just have to walk through said mist to pick up a positive
thought?!?! After two years-plus of dealing with my health, my cancer
continues to be taking a beating. Yay! After over a year, my stomach
problems have me right back where I was when the issue started, over
a year ago. Boo!
The latest anti-nausea medicine I was
given has been pretty effective at it's given task. My general crappy
feeling has diminished some, but it has been replaced by an
overwhelming anxiety and difficulty sleeping that takes me back to
the early days, early morning hours, of having cancer, where I was
thinking about copying over “War and Peace” in pencil just to
reduce the amount of excess energy that was whanging against the
inside of my head.
So, here I am in my pjs, if you can
call sweat pants and sweat shirt pjs, thinking about my funeral...
again. It is probably getting harder and harder to convince you that
this is not a negative run of thoughts. But it's not. We don't lie to
each other, remember. It's just how my mind works and what, frankly,
makes me laugh. Ha! Ha??
First off, he said maybe getting to the
point, if you write about/speak of me after I'm... you know...
“gone,” please don't refer to his “brave fight,” “courageous
battle” or like that.
Wait a minute. You know what... Do/Say
what you want. It's very poor form, as we used to say in the snooty
school I went to in Scotland, to be telling you what to do... ever,
even about my own... you know.
But, here's the thing. I don't want
people to say things like that because, simply put, they aren't true.
There's nothing brave or courageous in what I'm doing. I'm just
picking and scratching and thanking God every day for putting the
former Sheri Martin (not her real name when I met her. Well, Sheri
was, though, officially, it was Cheryl. She did later change it to
Sheri, legally. It was never Martin, though. And as long as we seem
to be off the point again... When you get married for a second, or
subsequent time, and take your spouse's surname, are you still
technically giving up your maiden name? It seems unlikely, right? Oh
how my mind does wander...) in my life to fight along with me.
Back to the postmortem ...Don't put
anything about being a great husband. Right now, I'm doing a pretty
good job, I think, but I doubt that my first wife would say how great
I was.
I'm an okay dad. Maybe a bit better
than okay, but just a bit. I love my kids, including step kids Jason
and Kristie. (I hate the term step kids, by the way. It makes them
sound like less than. Truth is, they just haven't been my kids for as
long; but it doesn't change how much love I have for them.)
I'm a horrible grandfather. Horrible.
You think I'm overstating it? Ask me how old they are? I have to add
-ish to the number of years... eight-ish, 14-ish and so on. I do have
a firm grasp on the date of three of their birthdays. But unlike
horseshoes and hand grenades, I don't think close enough on the
number of grandkids or their birthdays is a qualifier when it comes
to grandpas being great. At least on most days I remember their
names. Again, “most days” doesn't seem like enough for greatness.
When we get to the part about “Survived
by,” we face a situation that is easy for me to write but probably
hard for most of you to either understand or accept. My sister and I
don't really care much about each other. Notice I said about, not
for. We don't. My sister has her life and I have mine. I wasn't even
going to let her know I was sick, because I knew she didn't really
want to hear it, but a second cousin of mine insisted, saying she
would let her know if I didn't. Which would have been fine, but I
didn't want to put the cousin in that spot.
So, I let her know and the result was
as I expected. A lot of hand wringing followed by nothing for over
six months followed by a “That's nice” when we discussed how well
the transplant had gone.
Please don't feel compelled to convince
me that that isn't true, that she just has a hard way of expressing
her emotions. She loves her family to pieces and I just don't happen
to be a part of it, except by blood. The same for me. You've seen how
much love I have in my heart. Let me be clear, though. I don't
dislike my sister; I certainly don't hate her. I just don't care
about her or her life. Hard to understand? Sorry. It is made easier,
I guess, with us living about 500 miles apart.
Still, let me close with a more typical
Arnold observation, though still obit related: I was born in
Scotland, and lived there for my first 14 years. I'm very proud of
being Scottish and was, even before “Braveheart” made everybody
burst with pride about being, or even knowing someone, Scottish.
Loved the movie, used some of the music in our wedding, but...
watching that movie and believing you know something about William
Wallace is like watching “Robin Hood” and saying you have an
understanding of the English feudal system. Just sayin'
There are a variety of versions of
the story that gives this blog its name. The pony is the constant in
all of them. A man is on his way to a party when he comes across a
young boy shoveling ass over tea kettle at an enormous mountain of
manure. The man asks the child if he wouldn't rather go with him to
the party than shovel all that poop. The kid says, “No way man.
With all that poop... there must be a pony in there somewhere
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