I admit it, I’m afraid to die.
I got to thinking today about the past couple of years. Where my life has gone.
How did I lose so many people I love recently? Both in death and in friendship?
When will I go? And when I do, will the ones I lost touch with care? Will they
even know?
More importantly, will I have lived honestly and fully? Will I have
done all of the things I set out to do, didn’t know I should try and love as hard
as humanly possible?
The answer was a resounding no and that is where it began.
With all of the media deaths lately and more important to me, my friends passing on, I’ve been quite the morbid one.
I can’t deny I have always been petrified of losing the ones I love. So much so that I routinely since a child checked to see their chests were rising and falling with air.
Yet with all the time I spent worrying about losing my friends and family, back when I was younger, I never really put a second thought to my own death.
It’s only something in the past couple of years I have not only really started to try and wrap my head around but fear. Not a good feeling.
I got to thinking what if someone in the music industry interviewed me about my recent hiatus from the music business. What if they wanted to know every detail down to every thought.
At the end of the day, or life as it will someday be, any interviewer will have long forgotten a little folk singer like me. He’ll hardly remember he asked such profound questions.
So here I go. I’ll interview myself.
But instead of questions I am going to start with answers.
I often tell people the story of being 28.
When I was 28 I didn’t really know.
What I mean is, I was still in the phase of my life where things just flowed from one thing to next. One year bled into the next. One heartbreak to another. One town to one city, to another country and so on.
I wasn’t really watching the clock. Time was moving slowly.
Of course I could have died at 28. But I didn’t. And more than anything, I just didn’t have a huge sense of my own mortality. I lived pretty free and allowed people, places and things to touch me as deep as they could and not give a second thought. I knew how to live. Mostly.
Then at 35, on my birthday, I woke up with not only the obvious fact I was 35 but a psychological, physiological sense of being 35. Like waking up with your eye mask when it’s light but for a minute, you think it’s still dark. When it comes off, it’s a major shock. That’s how I felt. Shocked into 35.
And I believed and still do, in the 7 year cell change.
They say every 7 years your cells change and along with your whole make up.
I wasn’t waiting for it or anything. In fact, I don’t know that I was aware of it then. I just know on that day, I leapt from 28 to 35. Really, in one day I felt 7 years older in every way.
It wasn’t long after that while touring in Greece I met my husband.
I knew when I left for that particular tour I was a changed woman. I knew something was coming and I saw everything in an entirely new light. I was waking up, again. For the first time? I can’t be sure. However I do remember clawing and scratching my way onto the Transatlantic flight. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to leap anymore. I started to get scared for the first time in my life.
To make a long story short, we met, we courted, we married. And here I am happily married and living in the alps of Austria.
Sounds like an ending doesn’t it?
And it is in some ways. But a beginning I couldn’t possibly imagine took a strong hold and has not let up since. Everyday it’s stronger and everyday I feel my skin is going to burst open.
I was married, friends started dying. I mean, really good friends. Not that any passing is ok but these were the ones I expected to sit in old age with on the porch.
Just like that, gone.
And then I realized I may have missed a few important stops on my life path. How could that be? Time was moving so slow. I had so much of it. I thought.
All of sudden my clock starts ticking. I mean, it just went off one night. Screaming, blaring, thumping, bashing me over the head with the sound of it.
Baby. Baby. Baby.
Then when I thought things were weird enough, I started to have some health issues. Major ones that required a lot of hospitalizations and with that, show cancellations. In turn it was like dominoes and pieces began tumbling.
I couldn’t stop it, I couldn’t save me. I had to let things fall where they may.
It was like one day I am 28 and the next I am reaching a ’semi-middle age point, baby making time but I have no time, where are my friends, what did I miss, what should I do point.’
Crisis? You bet.
And how did I deal with it? I stepped away from the very thing that gave it to me. Music. It’s just what happened.
I can’t explain it any better nor excuse it anymore.
I’m coming back now. Slowly. On my on terms. But I’d be telling a big, fat lie if I said I am not sick of answering the questions about where have I been, when will I come back and why did I leave in the first place.
Life. Life just caught up with me and there was that one day that I just woke up.
I woke up and realized it was mine and mine alone and I had to accept where I was, what I was going through. Live it, deal with it and move on.
And I have.
It was a slippery one this time. Hard to keep in my hand. Not tangible but I think I understand now. I’ve got a hold now.
Truth be told, you couldn’t pay me any amount of money to go back to 28 or 35. Really. I worked too damn hard to get here, I’m not going back now.
It’s time to get to work on the next phase.
Before my time runs out.
