The Living~Dying Duet: Living and Dying Take On New Meaning

Not "Life as Usual": Feeling More of My Living and Feeling More of My Dying

My life has become a Living~Dying Duet. These two parts, living and dying, are both active. They are not the same as being alive or being dead which are both conditions, both states of being. Living and dying are both processes. I am living which means that I am continuing with the activities of living, I am doing things which are part of living, and there are many things that come along that change how I am living and the activities that I do as part of living. Living is an act of expanding and of interacting with the world.

At the same time that I am living, I am also dying. Dying is the process that I am going through which will end in me being dead. These include physical and mental decline which are increasingly obvious and which are a measure for me of my continual decline. For the first time people are asking if they can help me do something, which never happened before. I had always thought that loss of memory and loss of function were two different things, that I could find ways of handling memory loss but that loss of function would be a sign that the time has come to end my life. Now I'm feeling that they are not separate, that there is not a black line between them but rather an area of shades of gray, and that forgetting things is affecting how well I'm able to function. Dying is a process of contraction and of recognizing things that had not been present before, this is a process that the end of which is my death.

For me it took living and dying coming closer to each other for me to feel each of them more clearly and more strongly. This is an early effect of their dancing a duet.