Yesterday was the first day of my 69th trip around the sun.
At almost threescore years and ten birthdays are, well, kind of a mixed blessing - at best.
Making it to another year is fine. It beats the living Hell out of the alternative. But it's a reminder that my remaining time on Earth is fleeting, and that I now have some kind of serious malfunction inside my head that is killing me, and will, eventually, dispose of me in a really fucking nasty way; Parkinsonsism (or whatever you want to call it) is a damn hard way to go.
And yesterday was, even as sexagenarian birthdays go, just pretty sad.
Woke up late - one irritating Parkinson's effect is messing with sleep, and I had a bad night - so slept through my usual Sunday kendo. I didn't have any particular other thing I could think of that I wanted to do, so, despite it being a sunny day, I didn't do much of anything. I'm plowing through a good book ("Cold Iron", by Miles Cameron; fun swashbuckling swords-and-sorcery novel), so I spent a fair amount of that time reading, which was fine but, y'know, lonely.
I splurged on a damn fine dinner - grass-fed rib-eye and new asparagus in garlic butter, with a malty Oktoberfest - but ate it alone. I thought about going out for a high-end restaurant meal but that seemed even sadder than cooking and eating a meal by myself.
In the dark of late evening I couldn't help but look at where I stand.
In my life to date I've tried to be a good citizen, a good soldier, a good scientist, a good husband, a good father, and a good friend.
To my credit I think I was, indeed, a very good soldier and a damn fine professional geologist. I was as good a citizen as I could be, though I now regret not being more trouble for the Republican sonsofbitches that led my nation, and especially my Army brothers, into wars we couldn't, and didn't win (while in the process wrecking a damn sight of Southwest Asia as well as our own supposedly-sacred national honor).
I've tried to be a good friend. And I've tried, and am trying, to be a good father.
Sadly, to my shame, in one of the great trials of adult life I have failed.
Failed to be, in the end, a good husband. A caring partner, a gentle and caressing lover, a fierce advocate, and loving friend. Twice now a good woman has looked hard at me and found me utterly wanting.
That's...indescribably painful.
My marriage of more than twenty years is over. Done, dust and ashes, and I can't help but feel like what was and should have been one of the great works of my life was a failure of crushing weight. That the grief of, and the grieving for, that loss will be with me, mark me, until the Parkinson's finally does it's work and relieves me of the remorse.
The thing is that tomorrow is...a day. Ending in "y". So I've got work to do, words to write, children to worry about and encourage, hobbies to putter with, Republicans to kill (okay, well, no...but that should be on the menu; these fucksticks are more worthless than plague rats and twice as big a nuisance), every little thing that makes daily living so busy.
I'm old. And alone. That's not a complaint; that's just the reality.
But I'm not dead. Not yet.
And while I'm not, well, tomorrow I'll do what I've tried to do for the past sixty-nine years and a day; shrug my ruck on, settle the weight across my shoulders, look up from under my helmet brim, and move out towards whatever the objective of that day might be. Embrace the suck. Deal with it.
That doesn't sound like a cheerful sort of way to greet each day, does it?
Fuck, no. I'm a sergeant; expecting the shit rain to fall is what we do, because we're the ones who have to figure out a way to work those troubles out. Cheerful ain't what I do.
But, goddamn it, I've tried to do the best I could.
And for now?
That'll have to do.
