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.

There is a secret reason we use Facebook. And it’s not self-aggrandizement, not obsessive status updates. It is not even finding out who’s still single.

It is seeing that she got fat.

Maybe not morbidly obese, but definitely not the girl who looked good in a bikini. The one who broke your heart. Who maybe cheated on you. Maybe you thought she was the one. Or maybe you were just angry that you put up with little rat dogs for so long, just to get dumped.

Whatever.

The point is, Facebook has pictures of her looking fat.

There they are. You know that maybe you haven’t aged like find wine either. You’ve got a little more gut and a little less hair. But you haven’t been so foolish as to post, where any ex-girlfriend could find them, photos that clearly depict your decay.

But she has.

This doesn’t reflect well on me or you or any of us. It’s a selfish, un-Christ-like pleasure. But it goes down like a cold beer after a long day at work. You hear the whoosh of air when you crack the cap and that first, refreshing, foamy wave of sweet beery goodness flow over tongue, washing away the world’s pain as it goes down.

It won’t last forever. It may be associated with painful hangovers and shrunken livers. It does not replace true love, sunsets, and great art.

But it feels so damn good for just a little while, doesn’t it?

My cousin called me the other day to tell me that the transplant center in Baltimore had declared us a match. I could accept her kidney.

Her mother had donated a kidney to my mother. So this was keeping with a sort of tradition.

It is difficult to explain how feels to be told that you are now significantly less likely to die in the next six months. That, some day soon – perhaps in as little as a month – you will feel better in ways you can’t even understand right now, because it’s been so long since you weren’t feeling the constant ache, fatigue, and pains of a body slowly poisoning itself.

In the movies or books, poison moves swiftly. I don’t remember the context, but my friend Ryan, back in 1995, assured me that, no, being poisoned is actually an exceedingly painful way to die. Well, I can now vouch for that truth.

Of course, I haven’t died. Not yet. And I may not now for many years.

First your’re just tired. Then stairs get tough. Standing (more so than walking) is tough. Your girlfriend wants to go out for dinner and movie and you have to explain that you only have the energy to do one of those thing. Then one day, it all breaks. You can’t go out at all. You can do one thing day. I have to start taking days off work because you just can’t move. If you do work, that’s all you can do. If you don’t work – you can do one thing that day outside of the house. And you feel a little ashamed on the subway because you have to sit down and sometimes it is crowded and an older lady has to stand and you want to give her your seat, but you just can’t stand for that long. And you think everyone is looking at you because here you are, a healthy looking young man making this old woman stand. You tell your girlfriend about this experience and make a joke about how even though you probably look better than you have in years (because you’re losing weight), you actually feel so awful in a way you can’t even describe. And she looks at you funny and says that everyone has commented about sick you look these, but no one has said it your face. And in someone ways, you feel better, because maybe the old lady understood that you weren’t well, but you’d also been clinging to the fantasy that you still looked ok, but apparently people have been able to tell for weeks or even months that you’ve been dying at a significantly faster rate than other people.

I don’t go to confession (or reconciliation – which  is the correct term, I believe) very often. Far less often than I should. And I admit to leaving the sanctity of the confessional with mixed feelings about sex and sexuality and am a terribly hypocrite for at least a week afterwards (like the child who tries to be good, starting 48 hours before Christmas, to make up for having been so rotten the previous 11 months and 3 weeks.)

But I will say this – 2 out of 3 times, something good happens to me within a few hours of receiving absolution.

This time, I found out that my cousin’s kidney is a match for me and that a transplant can go through. I’m not saying this is causal, but it can feel that way sometimes.