Why Bother

I'm feeling good today, better than I have in the last few days. I know why. It's because Katherine was with me last night, and this morning. Whenever she is around I feel better. She is a strength in my life, a reason to keep living. She keeps me alive.

The last few days have been tough. More than once I have thought "why bother?" I would say that the single greatest intellectual struggle I have, on a day to day basis, it the struggle with one basic question. Do I want to live like this? Why bother?

There are a great many things which impact my quality of life and my desire to live, not the least of these being the people around me, the people who make my life worth living.Yet, notwithstanding this incredibly positive influence in my life, I struggle on a daily basis, asking myself if what I have is worth living for, if the life I have is worthy of the continuance thereof.

Given the pain, the challenge, the frustration, and ultimately the aloneness of it all, I am compelled to ask myself if it matters if I am here for one week, one month, one year. I wonder if all of this is worth it. Dying is easy; it's what will happen at the end of my life. Living, like this, is hard. It takes so much out of me. So often I want to give up.

Then, Katherine comes along. She sits with me, hugs me, tells me everything will be okay. She nestles against me at night, rises up with me in the morning. She makes coffee and breakfast, brings them into me on a tray, sits beside me and shares this time with me. She gets me going in my day.

It's very easy with a disease like this to fall into a well of self-pity. It takes almost nothing to throw me off keel, to push me over the fine balance line between feeling alive and wishing I was dead. Falling off that balance hits hard, leaving me drowning in my emotions. I need help to get out of that wallow, help to come back to balance.

Katherine does that for me. She is why I bother.