I had an interesting episode today. Actually, it was more an interesting couple days. I had a phone call from a friend back in the old days—some 20 years ago—when I was involved in MENSA. She told me that a woman had dated and I hadn’t seen for years had contracted Lou Gehrig’s disease which is apparently a death sentence. She had somewhere between 1-3 years left to live and, by the time she found out, since she wasn’t a big believer in doctors, she was already significantly restricted in her movement and needed to have a walker to simply get out of bed and go to the bathroom.

That was fairly telling and gave me pause.

We had to disconnect at that time because she was on a cell phone and had gotten cut off several times as she was talking to me as I sat at my office desk. We finally connected 2 days later, as promised, and she told me that another mutual friend in those days, an absolutely brilliant man responsible at a young age for the technology team that put a man on the moon, had contracted bladder cancer at the age of 56. He was optimistic, since bladder cancer is not necessarily a death sentence, but was obviously suffering the consequences.

For the very first time in my entire life, the toll of time wasn’t ahead of me, affecting earlier generations much older, but was side by side. I don’t know what it means. And I don’t know how I feel. But somehow, as the engulfing waves are at my side, not way behind me, I wonder what I should be feeling.

I’m not feeling fear, per se. And I’m not necessarily feeling melancholy. I am feeling sadness. Sadness for them, of course. But also sadness in life. I know for a fact that the progression of life will eventually overtake us all. There are no survivors. Each and every one of us will eventually be called to our maker.

But it’s a whole lot different when it’s close enough for you to feel your compatriots—your kindred spirits—falling victim.

There will come a time in which I will lie among the fallen. It could be tomorrow. And it could be 20 or 30 years from now. What I do know, however, until such time as I know for sure, I will give it everything that I’ve got, each and every day, to create the artifacts of my effort continue to nurture the offspring of my heart.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 16th, 2006 at 8:05 am and is filed under Larry Pino, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.