Eyes Open
People change, don’t we. Change or die. In truth, change or not change, and soon die anyway. I have for many long years been peacefully ready for whatever God has in mind for me next. Five years ago, with “two to five months” I was perfectly accepting. I kept telling a friend, “It’s okay.” To which he would respond less and less patiently, “No, Tom, it’s NOT okay.” But it was OK, I was OK.
Even so, I was surprised and pleased when they pulled the tube up my throat and, after struggling thinking I was drowning, I opened my eyes and looked into the faces of my grandson and my daughter and exclaimed, “I’m alive!”
For my time under the Cleveland anesthesia, I’d planned and expected dreams, even practiced a dream a couple days earlier while in the closed tube of an MRI machine. In there 45 minutes, I kept my eyes closed, never opened eyes lest I panic. Eyes closed, I worked my dream while simultaneously staying awake for when the technician said, “Deep breath. Hold it. ... Hold it. ... Hold it. ... Exhale.” I didn’t panic, in fact my dream, on a cold day in Cleveland, I went to the beach, spring 1953, just before high school graduation. My exams all done and I went to the beach. Jetties. Lying on the sand, under the sun, against one of the enormous jetty rocks. All afternoon. I had that dream ready to go again, but under the anesthesia didn’t dream, not at all, no dream came the entire time, those however many hours it was. I was gone. Absent. No feeling, just gone. Not. I think that’s what it will be like. Okay by me.
Oddly, I don’t feel that way anymore. Selling an enormous house that had become too much for me because I had grown too old to deal with it or even to want to deal with it anymore, and moving to 7H, opened a new chapter of life that's such a joy that at eighty I’m wanting to start over at twenty and spend all of it here. Maybe Linda feels the same. Mind, I do not want to go back to 1956, God forbid, just to be twenty next time I open my eyes.
Maybe I will be. Whatever you say, Lord.
Pics: 20160108 sunset from 7H