A few days ago, as I was opening my office I glanced in the mirror and was startled to catch a glimpse of my father. As I grow older, I look and act more and more like him. I've been working for his company for 2 years now, so it is not surprising that I've picked up even more of the same behaviors and attitudes; I only hope that I don't become quite as jaded as he has. As a property manager, I deal with 91 households in addition to myriad contractors and vendors. My experiences at this job have led me to see that far too often people do not do what they are supposed to do, and that can be incredibly frustrating. While I am beginning to look more and more like my father, he is beginning to resemble and act like my late grandfather. My dad is already hard of hearing, and just like my grandfather, he enjoys using this fact to his advantage-- "selective listening," my mother calls it. Just like my grandpa, and just like me, my dad loves to make a scene. For example, if our family goes out to a restaurant and he sees someone with a bunch of piercings in his face, my dad will inevitably crack a corny joke like, "I wonder if he gets ESPN with those?" Now don't forget-- my dad is deaf as a post, so he has a little difficulty controlling the volume of his voice. Over time, I've come to realize that he doesn't make these comments out of disdain for piercings or their respective owners so much as he makes them because he loves seeing my mom and anyone else at the table squirm out of embarrassment. The similarities between us have become frightening. We're all caught in an endless cycle of children becoming (as much as they struggle not to) slightly different versions of their parents, and then passing part of themselves to their children.

My father's mother is slowly dying, and her declining health is another source of sadness in a recent parade of tragedies and near tragedies. It's felt as though I've been standing in a lightning storm, and bolts of tragedy have been crashing all around me, but just missing me each time. 3 unexpected deaths in the Atlanta rave scene recently-- I didn't know any of these folks personally, but I had seen all of them at parties and I see their friends grieving-- a death in the psytrance scene-- again, not even an acquaintance really, but I knew who he was-- and the near death of one of my best friends. The bolts keep striking closer and closer.

My mom called me today to let me know that the doctors are planning to take my grandma off fluids this Friday, and after that it's simply a matter of waiting for the inevitable. Now I have to decide if I want to go see her one last time. Do I go visit the shell of my grandma- the woman who let me waste loaf after loaf of bread gleefully feeding geese off her boat dock, who spoiled me rotten letting me eat Cool Whip straight out of the container while watching cartoons, who, in later years, would pretend to remember my girlfriend every time she saw her and would immediately give her a hug and treat her like family, or do I content myself with my happy memories? She hasn't been able to recognize me for years, and even when there has been a faint glimmer of recognition, it's been because she thought I was my father. Similarly, she has been confusing my father with her late husband more and more over the past few years. I'm leaning towards not going to visit her, but I don't want my choice to not go see her one last time to haunt me, however hard it might be to see her in her current condition.

All these recent deaths and seeing my father dealing with the death of his mother have made me think about my parents' and my own mortality-- The only thing that really separates us from the beasts is our awareness that some day we're going to die-- My friend Kimi wrote me a very nice letter recently, in which she expressed how she felt that it was important to say and express what one feels in the moment, because life is so unpredictable. She said, "I don't want to look back on my life with 'I wish-es' but rather, 'I'm glads.'" If my life ended tomorrow, would I be happy looking back on it? Would there be more "I'm glads" than "I wishes?" I don't know-- I hope so. All I know is that our time in this monkey body is fleeting, so I'm going to make an effort to increase my supply of "I'm glads," and I advise that anyone who's stumbled onto this blog does the same.

Be careful out there folks.

k