I Want to Live

“Oh heavens,” the post begins, followed by self-imposed justification of being too good for Facebook, then rambles every question in everyone’s head about what’s right what’s wrong to do in a worldwide pandemic where no one has a fucking clue except maybe the CDC has it the most correct, I don’t know.

Anyway, then the sucker punch landed... she wasn’t allowed to enter an empty store without a mask.

Well, them’z the rules honey, why can’t you abide? We’re all doing our best here [hands in surrender] because what the hell do you know more than the rest of us? You’ve got this figured out, eh?

Hey listen, I understand the frustration, I feel it too. Everyone does. We all do. No one in this world isn’t shaken in some way by this worldwide situation of fighting an unreliable, invisible enemy, but that doesn’t mean we start punching each other while everyone, and quite literally, everyone is down.

We are all down, each and every one of us, in our own ways, in our own lives, living our lives the way we know how but in a different world, in a quarantine world, a world with no answers, no foreseeable end to the destruction numbers, no wrong no right. Just is. What does one make of “just is” I guess answers my own question.

But at what point can you convince yourself you can fully accept what “just is?” When can you allow yourself to do that? Is that giving up? Giving in? Giving no more of One Self because Other Self is talking too loudly?

Anyway, going back to the Facebook post that’s been irking me, not because the writer suggests alternatives to playing it safe, or that she’s fed up with not being able to do her normal things normally, it’s that she whips a backhand bitch slap on a store that I’m guessing is locally-owned if it was empty and the employee, possibly owner, conversed with her about the new rules s/he as a small business owner decided to put together in order to comply with CDC guidelines to be safe and in the least of harm’s way, for her customers and also for herself, because you never know, her 88-year-old mother could be in recovery from battling her second round of cancer and so s/he has that to think about too, along with how to pay her employees and keep the books in positive for an undeclared amount of time because no one fucking knows anything. Can we all just agree on that?

NO ONE KNOWS ANYTHING.

We can all play like the experts we claim to be with snippets of stories from this person and that news report, but you will never know more than the trained scientists and doctors who study viruses. So why do we continue to cash in our two cents? I guess because it makes us feel more whole, as humans, to have a voice. We can speak our minds, and so we do, sometimes every single thought that passes through.

I’m back home. And by home, I mean east river, South Dakota. The state splits by the Missouri River running through the mid-section hugging the state capital of Pierre. SD residents define our selves by East river or West river. And if you’re familiar with the license plates system, you know without asking, but never fail to ask because good chance you also know the same person, or at least someone who’s related, another family with the same last name, always worth a shot because you usually win or come close.

I live West river now and love it, but East river will forever beat the nostalgic rhythm of home. Not only did I return to the flat grasslands, I am back inside my maternal grandparents’ home my grandpa built in 1974, the year I was born. My grandma was born in a small house across the gravel road from where I sit and type.

March 1921, almost a century ago, my dear grandma was born. She would have been 99 in 2020, couldn’t imagine what she would be thinking of all this Covid business. Her daily intake of the local news and family phone calls would have sent her sympathetic worry gauge into overdrive.

I sit here and look out the large picture window in the living room, the house would feel meek without it, but with it, the window offers a view of a small town world rolling through time. My grandma’s eyes gazed with memories of the dirty 30’s and the grasshoppers and the Great Depression. Mine remember outdoor movie nights and cruising around town on dirt bikes. This small town, this place of memories, this home, on the exact same spot where my grandma took her last breath two months before reaching 98 is where I sit, and where I sat the middle of the night she slipped away peacefully.

Grandpa fought for his last breaths where I sit too, and that didn’t hit me until just today that not only did both of my grandparents expire in their living room but I was there for both, active in both. Two cousins and I performed CPR on our grandfather 30 years ago while our grandmother, aunts, uncles, other cousins watched with frozen expressions.

Grandma ticked strong until she couldn’t. I joined my mother and aunts and cousin to care for her when hospice came to her living room. We counted the seconds between her last breaths until they became minutes until there was no more.

I know we all leave this realm which we decided to enter when and how we did, but how we exit isn’t written until it is, and so if I can prevent my direction from veering towards ending this chapter with an unkindly surprise, then that is what I want.

Maybe I want to feel like I have some control over life, and I do, if I so choose, but I haven’t been choosing lately and it’s been eating me alive to wallow in the worry pools of self-diagnosis and fear-mongering.

I want to live!