I think I’m dying
This poem/ramble was written on the 30th of April 2022, from the hospital, requiring 6l of oxygen to breathe. Spoiler alert: I didn’t die :)
I think I’m dying, and that’s OK.
My lungs are shit, yet no one would say.
My heart is racing. It doesn’t know it’s in vain.
Every single human goes through pain. Such is life, the price we pay.
My brain feels like hay, like a memory of my healthy ways.
My feet are ice cold, my face a hot summer day.
Instead of living life, I feel what life is. All these organs inside me, struggling and collaborating in this fight against enemies from all sides.
I observe them. I feel them move, jump, squash, crack, pow, slide, and refuse to surrender.
They try their best to keep me alive, but the cancer and the pneumonitis also want to thrive.
How long can it last?
My trusty Medicine should come to the rescue, but this time it seems to be as clueless as a baboon.
It feels too soon. Too unexpected.
But then again, isn’t that always the case with death? Even when it comes to us at an old age, we think it’s too soon.
“I should have gone sky diving!”
“I should have told them I love you!”
Weirdly enough, I don’t feel like doing anything like that right now. I don’t feel like writing my memories, giving last words of advice, or leaving a legacy.
I feel like being here, in the moment, observing. My body makes it pretty hard to focus on anything else anyway. But I don’t mind. Life is a short ride. I’m glad I got to live the last two years doing what made me happy in the moment, once I got the cancer diagnosis and realized death was coming sooner than expected. I have no regrets, nothing I wish I would have done differently.
So if I die now, that’s OK.
I also understand that dying at age 33 has a nice ring to it. It’s a palindrome, and 3 carries a lot of meaning in many religions. So it seems fitting that an Atheist like me, who thinks everything in the Universe in random due to the laws of Quantum Mechanics, would die at such a fucking beautiful number, so others can attribute it to a sort of magical symmetry and say, “This is proof that there are no coincidences!”
So yeah, this was my ramble about what’s going on in my head. I needed one, together with a good cry. It made me feel better. And maybe someone can read parts of this at my funeral — that sounds like a good way to spend my last line.
