starkers

reply 30

Hey Mumbles, long time no see.  It's really good to see you back in the forums again, especially since many of the old-timers have either stopped coming or have passed on.  Anyway, here's to looking forward to your continuing narrative.

 

Thank you  

One more final preparatory statement before I really get to my point.

Each time I post something I end up spending a lot of time trying to explain something that most people probably get right away but that no matter how hard I try to explain it there's likely to be some folks that either don't read my explanations, don't care about my explanations or don't understand my explanations. It's also possible that the fault lies in the inadequacy of my explanation, and if that's the case then I apologize.

But this constant prefacing of each statement I make with some kind of caveat emptor is getting tiring and I assume for those of you that get it, it's tedious and pedantic, so for one final time I'll try to make this as clear as possible knowing full well that sooner or later I'm likely to get flamed one way or another so if and when that happens I'll just deal with it as best I can but please realize I'm human too and although I try to avoid it I can be just as guilty as the next guy of lashing out because of a real or imagined slight and again for this I apologize.

This is the story of me. Like everyone else I've had many good things in life as well as many bad things. On the whole I have to admit that I've been blessed but no one should think that when I talk about my accomplishments that I'm somehow bragging or that I somehow think that I'm better than anyone else because of it. "Judge not lest ye be judged" applies to me as well as whatever audience this thread may have.

Conversely, when I talk about the bad things in life that have happened to me I'm in no way trying to elicit sympathy. Like I said overall I've been blessed and I've come to terms with the crosses that I've had and will have to bear. "I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet" also applies to me as well as whatever audience this thread may have. I realize that everyone else is just as human as I am and I will try my best to ignore the occasional personal, emotional response just as I'm asking folks to forgive me when I do the same. "Forgive us our  trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us."

So for hopefully a final time this is the story of me. The good things I describe are not bragging or an attempt to show how much better I am than the next guy just as the bad things I describe are not some sort of attempt to garner sympathy. They are simply the events that have shaped my life for good or ill. If I want sympathy I'll look it up in the dictionary, save yours for someone that truly deserves it because I neither want it nor deserve it.

Thinking about it, Mumbles, you and I are much alike when it comes to cell/mobile phones.  I neither owned or wanted one until Island Dog posted to say that his Nokia Lumia 920 Windows phone was the best he ever had.  I looked into it and decided upon a Nokia Lumia 820 Windows Phone because my mobility wasn't the best and it may have become necessary for me to contact somebody if I experienced issues when out and about.

Thing is, I don't like mobile or landline phones at all, but they are necessary for me these days.  After the Nokia Lumia Windows phone became unsupported I pretty much decided to not bother with another cell phone... that is until somebody recommended an Android powered Vivo S1, which I subsequently purchased for emergencies and to keep the line of communication open with friends and family living interstate. 

I truly do understand. I was just somewhat lucky in that I never did ever really have to have one for work and made it to retirement without one.

However, I'm pretty much done with discussing the cell phone thing and am ready to move on to the real reason for starting this thread. The cell phone thing was just a hopefully somewhat humorous starter topic to get the ball rolling before going into more serious weighty concerns.

So in Reply #32 above I loosely described the heart attack I had 18 years ago. All in all it didn't really affect me much. It was no different to any other injury or illness that I had gone through previously. Basically I got sick, eventually got better and then just went back to the normal everyday concerns that everyone has, mainly worrying about keeping my job and being able to retire on something a little more substantial than just trying to get by on Social Security. The day to day concerns really didn't allow me much time to worry about "big picture" concerns.

So that's pretty much how things went until sometime in 2015 when I found myself one evening having sufficiently difficulty breathing that I called an ambulance that took me around the corner to Emerson Hospital which, to make a long story short, figured out fairly quickly that I had congestive heart failure. At first it really didn't bother me all that much, it just meant that I had to add lasiks to my ever increasing daily prescriptions that seem to be an inevitable part of getting older.

I was marginally familiar with CHF since it was what ultimately killed my wife's father. Of course he was 88 years old (I was 63) when he was diagnosed with it and was 92 when he died but he had a lot of other issues in conjunction with the CHF. And while his death was a sad thing that strongly affected both my wife and myself directly, the death of a 92 year old is something that is not particularly out of the ordinary or unexpected.

I tried to get a prognosis out of my cardiologist but he wouldn't really give me a definitive answer. I've since found out that as far a fatal prognosis go some doctors are upfront about it and some aren't. It makes sense in that it really doesn't  help much to dwell on such negativity. So it left me doing something I'm really not a big fan of which is self diagnosis (or prognosis in this case) by a lay person over the internet, but it seemed like the easiest way to get an answer.

So I did search the net and found out (among other things) that the 50% survival rate of CHF is 5 years. By that time I had been living with CHF for about a year and a half so that meant that (assuming a not unreasonable standard deviation of 2 years and using the 68–95–99.7 rule of probability) I had a 68% of being dead within another year to another 5 and a half years and a 95% chance of being dead anytime between tomorrow and 7 and a half years.

That really affected me mentally and emotionally since while death is something everyone has to face eventually it's something that I (and I assume most people) hadn't really worried much about. Believe me, it's a big difference between knowing you're going to die someday and knowing you're a coin flip away from death in 3 years or so. For awhile I became quite anxious and had difficulty sleeping but eventually I did become OK with it (which is in itself another long story that I do intend to get into later just not now).

Anyway during this period of anxiety I thought about what there was that would leave a mark that I was ever here other than in the minds of the few family and friends I have left alive. I went and checked out a big old beech tree in a small park in Brookline, MA into which I had carved my first wife's and my initials way back in 1972. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that the bark had scarred and grown over but it did leave me saddened.

So the ultimate point of this thread is to make some kind of mark. Doesn't have to be big, doesn't really have to even survive beyond my death (because I wouldn't really know anyway) it's just me carving my initials on a tree.

Since that time I've been diagnosed with Gleason 8 Prostate Cancer which has been treated with radiation therapy (although I still have to wait another year before the hormone therapy wears off before I can find out if it was successful) and a year ago being diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome which I was told that gave me a 50% chance of being dead within 2 years (only 1 year left to go on that prognosis) and a 0% chance of being alive in 5 years (now 4) unless I got stem cell replacement therapy which I'm told is a very brutal process taking up to a year to recover from and even though there's a 70% chance of finding a match there's only a 50% chance it will be successful leaving me with an overall chance of a cure at 35%.

Basically I have three different statistics all getting closer and closer to becoming due. As if that's not enough right before covid-19 hit I got pneumonia (not overly surprising when my white blood count was effectively zero) which turned into sepsis, was intubated (my wife was told that most people in this condition died within a day or two but obviously I didn't) and in a coma for 2 weeks, spent another week in the ICU and a month in a rehab hospital. Luckily I got out and home a couple weeks before the pandemic really hit.

Anyway like I said I'm not looking for sympathy and I'm content with my life and my death whenever it comes. I've done my job, my affairs are in order, I've made sure my wife can continue to live the same lifestyle we had when I was working no matter how long she (or for that matter me as well) lives. I'm not trying to rush it and in the meantime will do everything I can to put it off but when it comes I'm ready to meet my maker if he (or she) exists.

If you're young and healthy, or even not so young and healthy, death is not something that's given much thought, it certainly wasn't for me. In my experience that's really the best. I assume for most people that die early (and early is a very relative term) death often comes quickly and unexpectedly either by trauma or major illness (heart attack, stroke) and in that case you really don't have much time to dwell on it. In the case of the other extreme where you're old enough to find death imminent I assume death can be viewed as a release. It's in between these two extreme's that I found to be particularly troubling. After all I was only 63 when I first started to face this and while 63 is old, it's not that old.

My mother is 92 years old, still very sharp, and still living in her own home but she once told me that getting old really wasn't for wimps. Truer words were never spoke. She had breast cancer years ago that has finally returned with a vengeance, she's also well beyond her own personal statistics of dying but she's now physically fading fast and I just pray at this point that her passing is without suffering. That's all I can hope for both myself and those I love or for that matter anyone else.

I would think that this is not something that most folks have given much thought to, but if anyone is still reading this and has also learned to face and accept their own mortality then I would be interested in how they accomplished it.

Yet again I feel the need to preface this before delving into it. It's not a particularly short story and it involves religion. Please don't get me wrong, I have no intention to proselytize. Religion is a deeply personal choice and one I've struggled with over the years. I've been on again and off again on the subject for years and truth be told I spent far more years of my life negative about it than not. While it's hard to criticize the bible's message of love and acceptance the concept of hell really bothered me. They way I figured it the primary reason that 99.9% of those that believe in any particular religion do so is because they were simply born into it. Also the fact that at least the religion that I grew up with stated that anyone that doesn't accept that particular religion was damned to hell left billions of well meaning people damned merely because of where they were born. That really wasn't a concept that I could accept.

Anyway like I said this is a long story and one that has covered pretty close to my entire 68 years so I'll at least get the ball rolling in this post.

My elementary schooling was at a nearby Lutheran one room schoolhouse that consisted of 40 kids grades 1 through 8. For kindergarten I had to go to the Detroit public school which probably contained 40 kids in just one grade (after all there was a reason we're called the baby boom generation). My 8th grade graduating class at the Lutheran school consisted of 4 kids.

The Lutheran minister was the sole teacher and we really didn't learn anything fancy but the three R's (Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic) plus the additional R of Religion (specifically Luther's small catechism, but if that was small I'd hate to have to learn the large version). The Lutheran minister was a outwardly gruff and dour old German that taught all us kids the fear of God as personified by the minister himself. Most of us kids were truly afraid of him because he had no issue expressing righteous indignation about anything he felt deserved it. However, deep inside there wasn't anything he wouldn't do for anyone that really needed comfort. It was really in his honor that I picked Martin Luther as my avatar on this site.

Anyway I'll at least try to wrap up this introductory post on the topic of religion quickly. It was a requirement of attending that school that I also attended that Lutheran church. No big deal. Even though my mother grew up in a different form of protestantism, Lutheranism was close enough, and it wasn't as if as a child I had any choice in the matter.

For awhile things went on normally enough until sometime in 2nd grade the minister realized that I hadn't been attending Sunday school and told me that was a requirement as well. Again no big deal. Kids in those days did not question or talk back to any adult, the consequences were simply not tolerable.

So the next Sunday I went to Sunday school, 2nd grade meant I was 7 years old. Anyway the topic of the lesson was faith. One of the chief tenets of Lutheranism is that you're saved by faith and faith alone. I didn't really buy it. I wanted to know why but I was told I just had to accept it, but being a rather precocious kid I needed a better reason than "you just have to believe." The following Monday the minister took me aside into the entryway of the school and wanted to know why I made such a stink in Sunday school. I explained that I was told I had to believe "just because" and I really needed a more concrete reason. His response was that I didn't have to go to Sunday school anymore although he most definitely required I continued to go to church. This was the first seed of doubt that entered my mind.

Anyway that's more than enough for now. More later.

Hmmmm, there seems to be a preoccupation with death here and I'm curious.  I'm 67 in 3 weeks and I only ever think about death [my own] once in a blue moon.  I understand that it will come one day but rather than dwell on it I tend to think about life and living.  I even make plans for the not-so-near future.... just in case I'm still around to see them through.  Shoot, I'd even consider marrying again.... if somebody 'd have me, that is.  

I guess we all deal with it differently, though.  My father had the attitude that he'd live for ever, and in some ways I'm just like him, in that my own mortality is not something I think about very often.  Sadly, he passed about 20 years ago, though he pretty much fulfilled his dreams.  Mum is 87 years young and still going strong.  She is still quite active and in good health.  She still gets around unaided and is quite spritely for her age.

As for religion, my sister and I went to Sunday School as youngsters, but it wasn't something we continued to do as teenagers.  Thing was, neither of my parents were religious, so they didn't force the issue of us going to church or Sunday School.  In fact, my father always said that religion was for people who were afraid of dying and needed to believe there was something after life here on Earth.  Me, well I'm neither religious or an aetheist.  I sort of believe in a higher power, a creator, if you will, but not sure what or who it is.

Then there's the playing hookey from work.  I rang in sick one day because I wanted to go to the cricket [England vs Australia one dayer] and got caught out when the TV cameras honed in on the section of spectators I happened to be among.  Then there was the other time I rang in and told the boss I wouldn't be in cos my wife was having a baby.  The next day he asked if it was a boy or a girl.....

"Dunno, we gotta wait 9 months now."     

I never had a choice re going to Sunday School.....my mum was the teacher...

I grew up to have a healthy disrespect for Church....simply because it interfered with my weekends.

Nah, not me.  While I may not be a church goer I still respect the choice of those who wish to attend.  Thing is, my sister and I were sent to Sunday school as youngsters with nothing much else to do on Sunday mornings, so it didn't really matter so us.  Besides, the lady who ran Sunday School was a kindly old soul who loved kids and who made us feel so welcome and comfortable.

By the time we were teenagers, however, with our friends, things to do and places to go, we were given the option of going or not, meaning our weekends were [within reason] our own.  I spent much of my time at the beach, either fishing or swimming, depending on the weather.... not to mention exploring the caves, the countryside and girls.

Oh, and the church where we went to Sunday School was 950 years old.... making it over a century old today and still standing.  Nope, they don't build stuff like that any more.

If I didn't have the prognosis of having a 50% chance of being dead in a year and an infinitesimal chance of being alive in 4 years then I'd probably feel the same as you except for the being married part.

I've been married to my 2nd (and final) wife for 31 years now and she is my biggest motivation for striving to survive as long as possible. Besides the love and companionship (which after all is the most important thing) she needs me to bring in the groceries from the car and to fix the TV when she messes it up and to play a dvd which requires changing the tv's input mode, among a whole bunch of "honey do" things that she simply can't do.

Jafo

reply 37

I never had a choice re going to Sunday School.....my mum was the teacher...

I grew up to have a healthy disrespect for Church....simply because it interfered with my weekends.

A very understandable and not particularly unusual response of rebelling against the excess of the previous generation. It's something I did as well.

I often thought that there's a somewhat cyclical nature to generations where you often have more in common with your grandparents than your parents. I had a somewhat atypical childhood in that I grew up into my twenties knowing both my grandmother and my great grandmother and I seemed to be more like my grandmother than my mother or great grandmother and my mother was in a lot of ways more like my great grandmother than like me or her mother. The analogy is by no means absolute but there's is something to it as well.

My grandmother had an outsized influence on my life which I hope to get to later on but not just right now.

When I saw your post, Mumbles, I had a premonitory feeling as to where you were headed...a radar of sorts, if you will, possibly influenced by recent losses here, and in my lady's family (her parents). Thinking about the end of life...it doesn't really worry me with regards to myself, as whatever lives will die. Personally, I used to believe in a sort of nebulous deity compatible more or less with Judaism, but that too, passed. Regarding an afterlife, I can't say I can conceive of nothing, as one cannot experience it, consciously. I can't offer, in good conscience, a pablum such as, "they're discovering new things every day", which while true, does not relate to the probability of such discoveries relating to three separate problems in a relevant time period of say, three or so years. I hope the Covid-19 vaccine comes more quickly than expected, as I'd like to see a few places and do a few more things, as do you, perhaps. Anyhow, I do hope you and your wife will be pleasantly surprised to find you a very highly significant statistical outlier to the tune of p<0.0001. Do feel free to add zeroes. 😉

Anyway to continue with my narrative. I was 7 years old and had many years to go before I was done with enforced religious training and I basically decided that I put more trust in things I could touch, feel, see and demonstrate for myself than in something in which I could do none of these things. At the time my example was a light that went on when I flicked the switch up and off when I flicked the switch down. If it ever failed to turn on then either the light needed changing, the fuse needed changing or there was a local blackout that would be soon fixed. Not a particularly deep statement of the scientific method but heck I was only 7 at the time.

I stayed in Lutheran school throughout 8th grade and went to a Lutheran high school for my freshman and sophomore year but ended up going to military school for my junior and senior years. And while going to church was still a requirement at military school I ended up going to the local Episcopal church simply because they provided donuts.

I've glossed over a very long and very complicated story that's behind the above paragraph. I will probably get into the back story eventually but hopefully you can tell that I'm trying to go though my life on a topic by topic basis instead of a time linear basis. I've covered the subject of dislike of some aspects of modern technology while personally contributing to many other aspects of technological development. I've covered the subject of my imminent death and how it's affected me. Now I'm going into the evolution of my take on religion in particular because it has something to do with how I eventually became OK with that imminent death.

A person's life is a long complex contradictory thing and something not well suited to a simple statement of fact nor even very well suited to this age where most people express everything they ever want to in a 140 character tweet. For example I spent over 2 and a half hours writing and then another half hour editing my reply #35 above (and still was forced to edit grammatical errors after posting it). I'm happy if folks take the 5 minutes it takes to read it fully, but I suspect that many don't have the patience for even that much. Oh well.

I don't feel like spending another 3 hours at this point to go much further than this for now. But like it or not there will be more installments later.

Thank you for reading.  

Thank you for your kind words. Actually I do have some indications, which I haven't gone into in the interest of brevity, that I may become a statistical outlier but that's not where the smart money is right now. Looking at my posts I suspect brevity is the last thing that anyone would accuse me of but believe it or not I'm trying my best to keep things as short and easily digestable as I can.

Again thanks for playing along.  

To summarize for those not wishing to go back and read through all the preceding, this is the story of me, and currently I'm telling the story about how my thoughts on religion have evolved over the years and how that has affected me.

I previously mentioned how I was raised in Lutheran school from 1st through 10th grades even though since 2nd grade I had substantial doubts centering on the precept that being a true christian required an absolute faith in christian orthodoxy. By the time I was a sophomore in high school I was so fed up with the constant train of daily religious classes that I transferred to the public school system for the 2nd half of my sophomore year and went to military school for my junior and senior years. There's a whole big story about why I was sent to military school and why I was OK with it but that's not germane to this particular story, perhaps later.

I spent the bulk of my life from approximately 14 to 63 considering myself an agnostic, although my thoughts on religion per se evolved drastically during this long period. It became clear to me pretty early that the concept that the bible was the literal word of God was demonstrably incorrect. The idea that the act of creation actually occurred in 6 literal 24 hour days and resulted in the creation only in animals and people as they are today with no sort of precursor species is obviously wrong just as the idea that based on bible genealogy the Earth is somewhere around 6,000 years old is intentionally ignorant of reality. But when I was young most christians accepted both of these tenets as absolute fact and some still do to this very day.

When I was young I was not particularly subtle in how I looked at things as either black or white, right or wrong. As I aged I gradually saw that the distinction between these two extremes become fuzzier and fuzzier and began to seem more a continuous variation of shades of gray. For one thing while there are major difficulties in accepting many things in the bible literally that still doesn't invalidate the possibility that the underlying concepts could be valid.

This in itself requires that you believe that the bible is written over thousands of years by individual fallible humans and therefore cannot be literal truth because of "divine inspiration." This belief in itself would have most christians of my early years concluded that I was damned. The other thing is that the christianity of my youth featured pretty much equal parts heaven and hell. Today it seems that most christian sects don't focus on hell so much today. Believe me  I think the idea of trying to avoid eternal pain and suffering is a much stronger motivation than somehow gaining some sort of nirvana. To me death being the end of things was a far better fate than hell. But doing something out of fear seems so contradictory to the new testament teachings of love and acceptance.

I kind of hate to just cut it off here but this one little topic of my overall story is just way too long, disjointed and complicated and will have to be continued later.