I've been keeping a close watch on this guppy in my aquarium because I think it is going to die. It isn't eating. It isn't really swimming. Its gills are pulsating rapidly as are its fins which keep it in a suspended position behind the fake tree root near where the bubbles come up. Every time I go over to the tank I expect it to be belly up.
Thom died a couple weeks ago. Not a guppy, he was my human friend in New Mexico. We dated for a while and then he called it off. Fine. We stayed friends and we wrote each other letters. The last letter I got wasn't from him but from someone who told me about how Thom was in hospice. I went to see him and we had a few hours together. I said goodbye and thank you because he gave me help when I needed a lot of it -- when I was 21 and very clueless and very alone. When I saw him in hospice I could see he was probably facing the end -- so thin, no appetite, oxygen tubes and the pink gums I've seen happen in dying people -- like pepto bismol pink. But he was talking about how he wanted to get better and even drive his car again.
About ten days later he died in his sleep. I miss him, blah blah blah.
The last death I want to mention here is Timothy Treadwell's. He is the guy in the movie Grizzly Man -- Werner Herzog directed it. He seemed like a really sad person in a way I completely relate to. So vulnerable and sensitive it feels impossible to survive in the mean world. So what does he do? He flees. He goes to live with the grizzly bears in Alaska. So what happens? He goes there for 13 consecutive summers, films them, talks to them, lives near them. Then, after a long summer and a little bit of the fall, one of them eats him and his girlfriend. The crazy thing is there is an audio recording of the killing. He turned the camera on but didn't have time to take the lens cap off. The director described the audio -- moaning, a frying pan being wielded, six minutes in all -- but decided not to play the audio in the movie --thank god.
It's good to think about death because it wakes me up. Snap to it. Awake! But so far it hasn't made anything happen faster. I don't want to waste my life. I want to live it. Wake up! Wake up! But I'm still just here. Blah.
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