I Will Fight

It takes an awful lot of strength to deal with this disease; not just physical strength but emotional and spiritual strength as well. To get up each day and face the loss, to dress and eat and do the activities of daily life, to keep from sinking into permanent depression, to keep going when all logic and common sense say that you should give up and stay home; this takes more strength than anyone can imagine.

It would be so easy to give up, so easy to slide inward and stay here, to live alone in my little apartment like a hermit, seeing no one, touching no one, talking to no one, just looking out my window and listening to the world go by. It would be so easy to stop fighting to live and instead just find a comfortable way to die. It would be so easy to give up inwardly, to condemn myself as having no useful purpose or worth. All I would have to do is let it happen, to allow this kind of life to come into me and reside. All I would have to do is refuse to fight.

It's the whole fighting to have a life part that takes so much strength. Think of how simple and easy  it would be for me, or someone like me, to stay at home and let the world come to him. It would be a quiet, empty, sleepy world; a world where I could slowly slide into the end zone of my life, lost deep in my own self. It's the fight to have a life that consumes much of my days.

It's not just the physical fight. So much of the world around me is set up for me to disappear. People in wheelchairs shouldn't be out drinking at night. People with terminal illness shouldn't be off galivanting around the world, driving across country, taking off at a moment's notice. People who are sick like I am sick should be staying at home, resting, trying everything possible to give themselves a bit more time, time to live a quiet, sickly life.

I decline the opportunity to live down to that expectation. I may be obnoxious. I may be loud. I may be inappropriate. I may be just a little bit over the edge, perhaps just strange. One thing I am not is a quiter; one thing I refuse to do is to die quietly, without having lived. I will fight for that, even though it wears the hell out of me. I will use every bit of my emotional, spiritual and physical strength to keep on fighting until I can fight no more. I will fight to live.