Thank you all for listening to my travails and for your comments on my previous post. A while ago, I saw the author Barbara Ehrenreich on the PBS Newshour discussing a new book. Something she said stuck with me. She told the interviewer, "I'm old enough to die." When he asked what she meant, she told him that she now eats as much butter and other goodies as she wants to and should she be diagnosed with cancer, she will not go through extreme treatments just to be kept alive for a few more months.
I liked that idea. I don't feel like I'm there yet, but I hope to understand that I am when I reach that point. Right now, I'm willing to try the medicines the doctors recommend, but not if they will ruin my present day life. Particularly since diabetes is the only negative I have. My heart and all the rest are just fine.
After witnessing what Errol went through in the liver transplant ICU, I made sure to include specific instructions to just let me go in my Living Trust. This is something I think everyone needs to do. He had not, so there I was, making life or death decisions for him.
On to more fun things. My friend in Denmark and I have been looking back on our younger years in Princeton. It's almost scary how easy it is to find old friends and lovers online. She found me online and now she found several people we knew back then. I was happy to see that they have lived good lives. Particularly a few that I had been concerned about.
This inspired me to organize and begin to read the letters I sent back home. My mother saved most of them and I brought them back with me after she died. I never read them, they were stuck in a box all these years. This week, I went through and read about my first year in Princeton, 1963.
Most things were as I remembered them, but many were not:
All these years, I thought that after my Jewish boyfriend split up with me for a reason I understood, but didn't approve of, I never spent any time with him again. I guess I assumed I got mad and that was it. But I learned that we continued a very excellent friendship for a couple of years after that, had season tickets to the Shakespeare festival at the local theater even. I have no memory of that whatsoever. Alec Gallup, of the Gallup polls, was a friend of mine. I know I worked for him for a while, but I was so certain that was in 1970, after my divorce, not 1963. And that was a reoccurring problem - the timing of things.
Back to the present. Yesterday, I was so upset with my diabetes control that I decided to reprogram my insulin pump myself. I knew I needed to make some drastic changes and had wanted to do this in the company of my diabetes nurse/educator. But I couldn't wait. My changes worked well overnight and for most of the day.
These are Joyce's horses. Sometimes, they get out and come galloping down her road. To see and also to hear them thunder down the hill is thrilling.
