as small as a world and as large as alone

5:18am October 21, 2014

I tried putting the heating pad inside the cat bed, because the heating pad isn’t very padded. Apparently this is a formula for kitty heaven or something.

For those who don’t know, Fey is 15 years old, has been growing increasingly stiff and seeking out warm places, so I’ve been trying to find ways to bring the warmth to her. I got her a heated cat bed that automatically warms to 15 degrees hotter than the cat. And I found a heating pad while housecleaning.

And she absolutely loves anything heated that I give her, to the point she gets territorial about it and tries to keep me away, lest I steal it from her or something. I just figure… she’s in her eighties in cat years, she’s earned a few creature comforts by now. Especially since I’m sure she has arthritis. I’ve seen her stand up from lying on the floor and be so stiff that she walks sideways a bit before she can stretch, straighten out, and walk forwards.

I’m planning on getting more heating pads and putting them around the house in her cat beds and favorite sleeping spots, so she can always find a warm place this winter. With all this death and potential death going on all around me it makes me wonder how many more winters she has. But surviving a Vermont winter as a desert animal is tough. She sometimes has been known to burrow under all seven quilts on my bed and curl up in my crotch because it was the warmest place she could find. And as she gets older and loses her subcutaneous fat layer, I think it’s getting harder and harder for her to keep warm.

Rick, the staff person who just retired, said that as he gets older it’s definitely harder for him to keep warm. I think he’s in his late fifties or early sixties. He looks a little older than he is, I think, but I’m a terrible judge of age. Especially since I grew up with women in my family who look young for their age and men who look old for their age – everyone thought, growing up, that my brother was my father, and my father was my grandpa.

And while it’s technically possible to have a father only 14 years older than you, that’s definitely not what happened with my brother. It’s just that he was 14 years older than me, he looked old for his age, and he was big and tall in both dimensions. Meanwhile I was skinny and short – shorter, according to growth charts,than I should have been given the height of everyone else in my family. (My mom was 5 feet 7ish inches before she started shrinking, my father was a quarter inch shy of 6 feet, and I’m 5 feet 2 inches. My brothers are tall, too, although I don’t know their exact heights at their tallest or whether they’ve shrunk at all the way my parents have. (My mom started shrinking early in life, my dad only later.)

Until recently, my mother showed barely any signs of aging, and she could still pass for 10 or 20 years younger than she is. My dad on the other hand just looks old, and always has, with his wrinkles and his grey beard that’s been grey as long as I can remember. And now even his regular hair is white. Weirdly, he hasn’t lost any hair to the chemo, even though other patients in his chemo group are completely bald. My dad still has hair, aside from the ordinary bald spots of an old guy. I’m glad. I’m wholly irrationally attached to my father’s beard, and wouldn’t want to see it fall out. Of course I’d be fine with it if it were extending his life, but the chemo isn’t even doing that.

So anyway, with guys in my family who tend to look old for their age, and women in my family who tend to look young for their age, I think that makes me an even worse judge of age than I normally would be.

I think I’m starting to show subtle signs of approaching middle age, though. Close up to the mirror, I see fine wrinkles beginning to form that don’t go away. I definitely have the starts of permanent vertical worry lines on my forehead, because I have two default facial expressions – one blank, one with my forehead scrunched together. (Kristina Chew is an autism mommy-blogger who has a son whose forehead does the exact same thing mine does. I bet he’ll get permanent wrinkles there too as he ages.) I’ve also got these very thin, fine wrinkles that stretch across my forehead. And I’m beginning to get grey hairs, have been for a few years at least.

Lots of people dread these things. According to a friend of mine, they’re reminders of our mortality. I guess that might be true if you’ve always been relatively healthy, at least never had your life endangered on an ongoing basis for years, never had to prepare yourself for never reaching the age of 35. (I used to say 40 just to not alarm people, but I honestly think my lifespan was closer to 35 pre-diagnosis. I had begun waking up too weak to press my Safety Connections bracelet or hold up my head or breathe properly without my bipap, and passing out a bunch of times before it would finally go away. It always happened during the lowest cortisol time of day, suggesting that even though my sleep has no circadian rhythm, my homones still do. Some of them anyway.

I can’t tell how I look to others, though, age-wise. I know that when I was in my mid twenties, I still got asked “Is your mommy or daddy home?” if I answered the door. Which, while some people might find it degrading, I was more pragmatic: it gave me the perfect excuse to shake my head and shut the door, without having to run for my keyboard to talk to anyone. But these days, to myself, I actually look 30-something. And Anne is less 30-something-looking than me despite being two years older, but she also seems to be beginning to look 30-something.

Anyway, I was going to say, to some people, wrinkles and grey hairs are a symbol of mortality, so they fear them Some people even go so far as to dye their hair its natural color again (or some natural-looking color), or even to get plastic surgery. Which never makes people look young, to me, it just makes them look surgically altered.

Me, I see aging as the exact opposite. Signs of aging don’t show me I’m mortal. I already know I’m mortal. I’ve spent the last three years quietly preparing myself for my own death. i’m not a stranger to Death and not afraid of Her. But I like Life even more, at least until it’s my time to die. And each grey hair, each wrinkle, each laugh line or worry line, tells me I’m still alive. It tells me I may reach old age. And nothing would make me happier than being old people with Anne living nearby Doing stereotypical old people stuff that we already love doing, like sewing and crocheting and knitting, just sitting there next to each other and crocheting or something. That’s my best-case scenario – grow old as my best friend grows old. Every visible sign of aging is a promise that I might grow old before I die, and therefore a good thing, for the most part. Plus I like the way old people look, and keep trying to imagine how I will look if I grow old. Whether I’ve inherited my dad’s side of the family’s rapid greying or my mom’s side’s taking forever to grey. Things like that.

I still think i may not grow old, though. It’s still easy to die from the sheer number of health problems I have that make my health precarious. But I could easily make my forties or fifties now, so I could live into late middle age with no regrets. Really I already try to live my life with as few regrets as I can. I’ve said many times that the only question Death ever asked me was, “Have you Loved enough, and have you acted on that Love?” (I’m experimenting with capitalizing Love to differentiate the spiritual version of Love from the emotional of love. Of course in the best senarios, the two go hand in haand, but one does not guarantee the other, and lots of people get sentimentality (an emotion or set of emotions) confused with spiritual Love (not an emotion, but can provoke emotion).

The Love that Death asked me about was not sentimental love, but spiritual Love. You know how you can’t direct Hate? I’d quote the person who said it recently if I remembered who they were, because while I’ve heard it put in those exact words before, people are always rediscovering this fact. You can’t direct Hate because hate isn’t an emotion, it’s a state of being. It’s not an extra-strong version of anger, it’s a way of looking at and responding to the world. You can have all the sentimental love in the world and still behave Hatefully to a person or group of people, even the same people you sentimentally love. But the thing is? You can’t direct Love, either. You’re either in a state of being, perception, thinking, and behavior that is Love, or you are not. You can direct sentimental love, romantic love, friendship love, sexual love, and all the other kinds of emotional love out there. And some of those kinds of love are echoes of different aspects of Love, and may come up while you’re in a state of Love. But they’re still not the same thing. Love is a state of mind, of perception, of being, of action. It is hard to measure up to the demands of Love, because they often go directly against what our egos want us to do. But it’s still important to Love, and to act on Love, whenever you can

Someday I need to try to write down all the different things that are all lumped under love in the English language and cultures that speak it. But I’m too tired right now.

Love is the single most important thing in existence, though The kind with the capital L. It doesn’t mean being nice all the time, it doesn’t have to mean being nonviolent, it doesn’t lend itself well to…. is the right word prescriptivist?… notions of ethical behavior. Because the world is always changing, and so are the proper expressions of Love in any situation. You can’t work out a formula for how to behave from Love. That’s why I can’t be SJ, or anti-SJ, for that matter. They tend to think you can make Love (and real Justice is an expression of Love, too) into a set of rules. And you can’t. You just can’t. It’s not that I’m saying this for theoretical or ideological reasons, I’m saying it because it can’t be done and all attempts will backfire. That’s why I’m always urging people to step outside their respective echo chambers and embrace the wild, untamable thing that is Love. It’s a hard road, but when you have to face yourself at the hour of your death, you will find it much easier to answer that question “Yes.” And it’s the only ethical question that matters.

Anyway, now that I’ve rambled about every possible topic besides cats, I am so happy to see Fey enjoying all her warm spots. I want to make warm spots for her all over the house. There’s nothing I like better than seeing her comfortable and in less pain. She’s had a chronic pain condition in her back right leg since she was quite young.. But we don’t know what it is – only that you can touch her anywhere else and just get grouched at, but if the vet presses anywhere ennervated by this one nerve, the grouching turns into hissing and biting and snapping. The vet said she’s never seen another cat so able to communicate precisely where her pain is located. And by now I’m pretty sure she has arthritis too by now. We used to give her Prednisone for the pain, but the effort of getting it into her wasn’t worth the benefits.

But the heating pads seem to be working extremely well. Especially since the cold weather has been starting, she’s gotten stiffer and stiffer. And one good thing about having chronic pain is I know how it feels, I know how to spot otherwise subtle signs of pain in other people, and that includes Fey. So anything I can do to make her life less painful, I will do. And heating pads are a relatively easy thing compared to struggling to give her meds (she is an expert at horking up both pills and liquiids, and anyone who thinks you can disguise meds in food has obviously never had to take crushed up meds mixed in food… the taste is unmistakable and it doesn’t take feline superpowers to know it tastes disgusting.).

TL;DR: Fey likes her heating pad. I contemplate mortality and Love and aging.

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