My uncle Ricardo learned today that his son is in a vegetative state after the massive heart attack he suffered a week ago. His family faces the unimaginable reality of having to decide how long to maintain life support and avert the virtually inevitable.
My cousin is my age, and he has Type 1 diabetes. He's has some issue with being slightly overweight, but he seemed to manage that (better than I ever did). But his diabetes required management of what he ate, and the faithful injection of insulin. He was a doctor and a surgeon.
Apparently in what were the last weeks of his life, he spent trying to pretend that he didn't have this disease and could eat like anyone else. His wife said that his blood sugar readings were running more than twice what they were supposed to be. The doctors say that his untreated diabetes made him have a massive heart attack and lapse into a diabetic coma.
I can't help but feel like there is a bullet that I dodged, that my cousin took for me. The bullet we were both putting in the chamber of a revolver, giving it a spin, and pulling the trigger.
I ate an entire pizza by myself. Click. I went to a drive-through junk food on the way from one meal on my way to the next. Click. I had a bagel sandwich for breakfast for the 5th morning in a row. Click.
Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.
Bang ! ! ! ! !
I should be dead. This could have been me. No one asked for this more than me.
To die of an untreated disease, to be in the death throws of a massive heart attack, and to know - in my withering heart - that I was finally succeeding in killing myself, and to feel such overwhelming shame and regret about that, was my most diabolically secret and terrifying fear.
Nothing can be the same after this. Today I am treating my illness. I don't need to be like my mother, that when I was a child would drunkenly brag to everyone that she was invincible because she survived shooting herself with a 0.44 caliber Magnum in the stomach, and event buried in the lost memories of being a 5 year old.
I hereby amend the intention of this challenge, which I had dedicated to my son, and I also dedicate it, on behalf of my cousin, to the unknown someone that I will help some day, that is killing themselves slowly, one papercut at a time. To someone that is "loving with nothing more than hope, and crying with everything except tears".
I always had this intention, and it was that intention that I shared with Ani Pema Chödron when I first approached her, craftily coded so that she might recognize my bodhisattva vision, and it worked, and thus began a letter correspondence with her.
But now that becomes more real than I could have ever imagined. And I have narrowly averted being the one with artificial respiration and in an induced coma, and having my son and my parents facing the mortifying reality that I killed myself with a fatal unwillingness to take the medication and the medical advice my Doc prescribed — having only wanted for me to treat my completely treatable disease.
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