I am alive.

Alternate title to today's post: I am dying. (I refrained from making it my actual title, due in large part to a wish to abstain from needlessly worrying all of my facebook friends.)


So don't worry — my suspected brain tumor has not become a reality...yet. When I say I'm dying - I simply mean that I'm on my way off this planet, one day at a time.

But aren't we all? Every day we live means one less day we have to....well, live. It's as simple as that. We are all steadily moving towards death — some sprinting towards the inevitable, while others are slowly marching their days down. None of us know the day we are going to die, yet we spend countless hours obsessing, worrying and guessing about when and where death will meet us. Why, as humans, do we have such an undercurrent of fear for the one thing that is guaranteed in life? Is it our fear of the ultimate unknown? Fear of loneliness? Fear of the pain associated with death? Fear, fear, fear. What other reason is there to explain the overriding obsession we have with death?

Some of you realize I'm outlining the primary argument for existentialism. Being the wife of a self-proclaimed "existential psychotherapist" - I may think of this subject a bit more frequently than your average Jane. I would even go as far to say this is something I think about a lot. You see, I want to be able to live a life free of fear, and I would venture to say death is the root of most of my fears in life. Fear for my finances stems from a fear of not being able to be provided for, which comes from a fear of starvation - which, you guessed it, is founded in a fear of death. I want to look at the worst possible scenario - death - and find it isn't so scary, and that my decisions are defined by more than fear.

Now, I'm not trying to give an electronic plea for suicide prevention. I am simply saying I am not (well, try not to be) fearful of death. Why would I be scared of something everyone ever has failed to overcome? I want to be able to take the fear of death and transform it in to a motivation to live. Because of the threat of death, our lives become valuable, commodities to be cherished and valued.

I am alive. I am dying....but I'm not dead yet. I plan on doing a lot of living in the mean time.