I have been thinking about it: I am sick a lot. I have been sick a lot since I was a kid. I had bad stomach issues growing up, later the back issues, the allergies, asthma, mast cell disease. One way or another, I have almost always, in this life, been sick.

In addition to my actual sickness, how many times have I worried about being sick? All the cancers, the autoimmunity, the covid, bird flu. How is it that I can’t accept that that this body DOES get sick and die. That is its nature. Obviously, all my fear and hypochondria suggests I know it CAN get sick and die.  Logic tells me that eventually it WILL get sick and die. But I obviously think I have some measure of control, like the duration or the terms of sickness can be determined, at least influenced, by me.  

I can actually see my own thinking, the points I need to disprove:

• Sure, I’m sick, but not fatally so.
• I am not so sick I can’t accept it, at least I can continue to live-out my beloved story.
• I can prolong the duration of my health, or at least maintain todays’ or better level of health, till I die. 

But is this all even true? And to the extent that it is, does it even matter?

Sick, ok, but not fatally so…this time. Each time it seemed fatal in the past was clearly a false alarm. It was sick, but not terminally. But that’s normal. In a life,  everyone who survives long enough is sick many times; continually shifting aggregates, growing dis-eased until there is one final death is the nature of a 4e body. Eventually there will be a fatal illness. A fatal arrangement of the elements. How can I possibly take there not being one yet as any kind of confirmation about me? That I am special, that I am in control? It is crazy to think I am exempt from the fatal part when my elements show so clearly they are subject to the normal, like everything else, sick part.

Not so sick I can’t accept it, that I can’t continue to live out my story…I mean, what choice does anyone have but to accept their illness? People accept their handicaps, their pain, their cancer, their chronic diseases. Everyone accepts this stuff because there is no choice. The illness isn’t on our terms. We accommodate it. How can I take this universal fact, that we all bear the fruit of our karma, the limitations of a 4e body,  and interpret it to believe that enduring is equivalent to dictating?

I pretend that I can still live my story despite my illness. But its not true: I am not living ‘my story’, I am not executing on some great vison I had in the past for my present and future. No, I adapt, wiggle, adjust the story to fit the body, to accommodate my illnesses.  The proof of this is insanely obvious: My mast cell disease limits where I can go, what hotels I can stay at, the air quality my body can bear. I claim my story is me, it is alana, it is who I am, but the story is just my shifting narrative that recasts my hopes and dreams and sense of self in light of the actual facts this ailing, eventually dying body dictate.

I often think that the worst part of a terminal illness, what scares me the most, is I won’t get to continue to live, to create my story, it’ll just be over. Eric and I are always trying to imagine our future. We feel so restless when that totally fictious future seems uncertain. It seems so terrible to me to imagine something other than the future that my present-self desires. Afterall, the past is gone. The present is fleeting. I live for the future.

But is the end of my body the end of the story? Rebirth is driven by desire, by my craving to keep the fantasy, the story-of-self going. If the desire hasn’t died, the new birth is coming. It is just a different a body, a different name. A different fantasy that adapts to the limitations I face in the same exact way that right-now-Alana-story adapts to the limitations of body that I face.  

That I can prolong the duration of health, the duration till death. Duration is a bitch. The heart of my hope, what makes it so hard to smother my delusions. But, why should I believe I can prolong duration? Why do I feel like every time I haven’t died yet is on ALANA, as opposed to the causes and conditions of death not having yet been met?

If I really could control duration, wouldn’t I have been able to infinitely avoid covid? Sure I was able to lock myself away for 18 months. But does that prove I controlled duration? It was the fact that I had the karma –the resources, the will, the circumstances – that facilitated such a long period of isolation. And when it was exhausted, when I simply couldn’t endure isolation any longer, I promptly got sick.

I selectively remember the times, the places I believed I had some influence and I interpreted that to mean the power lies with me to delay illness and death. So while there is a duration of health, a duration of illness, a duration before death, this is not proof the power over that duration lies with me. Even if it did, is duration really satisfactory? No amount of healthy time, no amount of life while I am still so invested in the story of the future is going to be enough.

I lay hope for duration, for a duration that is satisfactory, for a story long enough to make alana true, on a shifting, dying 4e body I do not control. A body that has been sick, many times before.