Morning Mortality Meditation

I'm not sure how many 'get up at three o'clock in the mornings' you get in a lifetime, and point in fact, I'm not sure that that is a measured (or measurable) quantity but I may have hit it on Tuesday to start my day.

I was only up a few moments when I realized our house wasn't still settling on its foundation but that most if not all the 'still getting my sea legs sensation' was my internally generated contribution to the whole rise and shine routine on Tuesday. 

I called my boss and since we have the luxury of earning sick leave hours, I took eight of them at one swell foop and went back to bed, getting up some hours later a little less wobbly and by late afternoon was pretty much me again. Not sure that was as much an improvement as you might have read it as being.  

I started to worry about death when I was four (so, for purposes of this note, 'quite some time ago'). I have no memory of being concerned about the manner of passing but, rather, the whole 'the parade goes on but you are no longer in it' which I have been told is natural for children (no one ever says anything about adults with that same concern and I'm smart enough, almost, to leave well enough alone).           

I would bombard my parents with questions on the 'what happens after this life' phase of the program because I somehow assumed they would be experts. It was mostly my mom, as I saw a LOT more of her than I did of Dad who did get up at/about three in the dark of the morning to drive to a train station that took him into New York where he stayed more often than not until after I and my younger sister, Evan, had gone to bed. 

He would then start the process all over again the next day, and seemingly every day, for not only many, many years, and many additional houses and children but with very little variation until one morning when he failed to get up at all and was dead in his bed before he was 58 years old. 

I passed that natal anniversary in the rear-view mirror quite some time ago, but it doesn't mean the horror movie I make every time I have a stuffy nose or a sore throat is any less elaborate, because it most certainly isn't. 

And yes, I still don't like entering a dark room without first turning on a light though I suspect that will prove to be one challenge that will daunt me one fewer times than I might have first counted.   
-bill kenny