Deathwish 019: Jane
“we are all of us, once we’ve drawn first breath, dying”
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Fat Oyster is a great reading series, and there was a crowd of perhaps 60. The dystopian breastfeeding poem “four a.m. feeding” sounded just fine in my head:
milk splatters your face and fuzzy scalp
milk sweet and warm such
When I shaped the next line in my brain, which was “plenty to grow on,” it sounded fine, but when I spoke it, what came out was gibberish. Not English. Not another language. Not baby talk. Something else.
I thought, I’m having a stroke. Then: This will be a great anecdote.
My daughter carried my granddaughter across the back of the room.
I tried the line again: identical goo. The surprise of the stroke was that I was cognitively intact—even if not verbally. Aphasia was one of the most interesting physical experiences my compromised body had ever thrown at me.
It didn’t occur to me to get off the stage. The next lines came out normally, so I finished the reading, had my daughter run a stroke assay, and self-diagnosed it as a transient ischemic attack, or TIA. I’d been in ER before for what were likely similar attacks, and beyond thorough investigations, the docs had done nothing.
I think about dying every day. The last 4.5 years have given me a run for my medical money—months of unstable angina, a massive coronary, emergency stents, open heart surgery, surgical complications, heart failure, more ischemic disease. Death is my intimate. Every day I watch people get swept off the planet and wonder that the pajamas or the dryer lint they left behind survives them. Every day I worry for my kids and now the baby. We are vulnerable and strong all at once, but we are all of us, once we’ve drawn first breath, dying.
Fast or slow we go.
We go.
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To read the previous installment, "Deathwish 018: Asha," go here. To participate in Deathwish, find details here.
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Jane was born in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada and currently lives in Vancouver, BC.