Missing Cancer

I hate to go all dark & stormy on Strays but I can't shake the feeling - not constant, but maybe every day - that there is something to a short-term death sentence, a kind of deck-clearing impulse that helps address the background, adult-stage, low-level ADD that I, and I think many of us, find so troubling.

One way to deal with it is to try and remember that we are all under a death sentence, no matter what the immediate prognosis.  But I have always found this hard to believe, and not because I am blind to what has always been a 100 percent proposition.  (I am reminded of what one of my trusts and estates partners said when a client asked how a certain Will provision would play out if he died.  My partner said, "It isn't if you die.  It's when you die.") 

I can't quite take inevitability to heart because the futurist in me says that sooner or later, but probably pretty soon, this whole death thing will be come a lot more postponable, if not avoidable. So not only do I not have the spur of Mr. C's you-could-have-90-days, I'm not really sure it's going to happen at all.

But we need that belief, or at least I do.  Some guys get out of bed thinking about how to achieve the latest incentive their employer put before them in order to make mo' monah.  I wish I were like that, but instead I'm thinking about whether or not I'm thinking about the right things to think about.  That's a guy with time on his hands.

And there may be more to it than that.  Once you believe that there is a final curtain about to drop, you can stop worrying about the fact that you didn't discover a new continent, write a novel, or make it to the Supreme Court, or even come close to any of them.

So when I'm asked how I'm doing, which I still am all the time, I answer "Great!", because that's what everyone wants to hear, and it's true.  But at some level, it's with regret.  Odd.