After forcing my way through the last couple of months, I am finally no longer working. I no longer have the energy or the strength to work a full time job. I suppose it is what growing old feels like: the slow, wearing away of one’s physical abilities and the slight and constant pains associated with seemingly inconsequential movements. Supposedly, I have a new kidney coming. I am waiting to see what complications are in store. I have been able to put off dialysis, mainly through sheer , dogged stubborness. But not even the stubborn man can stave off death forever. If this doesn’t work out in a few weeks, waiting another month won’t be an option. Or rather, the options will be between immediate dialysis and death.

When my Aunt Petey slipped into a coma, the family finally decided to take her off dialysis and bring her into her eldest son’s home. The three sisters (my mother, Aunt Millie and Aunt Kerry) gathered around the hospital bed that hospice had installed in the living room and sang old songs like a family in some epic, sod-buster novel. I loved my aunt, but I never liked those kinds of novels. Too far from my urban, over intellectualized existence. When it was my turn to hold vigil, I read from The Consolations of Philosophy by Boethius. She took nearly a week to die. We were unprepared for it to last so long. The doctors said maybe a day or two. She was too full of her body’s own poisons. But there was that stubborness, again. She was frail, but her father, my Paw Paw, only produced one child who wasn’t unnaturally stubborn – and Aunt Petey wasn’t that one.

So why the cliched title? “The First Day of the Rest of My Life?” Is it because I have a new found love of life and a desire to go on. No, my will is more Nietzschean – more wrapped up in thanatos than eros or agape. I just can’t get over how strange it feels to be dying. To face the possibility of measuring out the last moments of earthly existence with Eliot’s coffee spoons.