Death is Inevitable. Living is an Option

That title sounded better in my head....I'm going to try to be real and not brave for you as I share a little about my feelings of living with dying of cystic fibrosis. Dealing with my own mortality took a real turn for me earlier this year, that I think partly contributed to my depression. I woke up one day realized I was 23, a graduate from college and I was fully living in adulthood. I had survived a childhood disease hardly scathed. What a wonderful occurrence until I turned around and faced THE REST OF MY LIFE. Which could end tomorrow, at 37 or 60 years. It really upset me, that the consolation prize I received for surviving a disease that has claimed children before they reached their late teens, was to still live with the disease and do even more to stay healthy! Now what? I realized I wasn't upset by death, we are all going to die, but pre-death. The time that you are aware of what your body is doing and that there is nothing you can do about it. Pre-death is slowly watching life being sucked from you. What I find to be the most difficult is your mind and how you compare what your life was and what it is now and what it will soon be. It's like trying to prepare for something you are so incapable of. I'm scared for the higher doses of medicine, the longer hospital stays, the oxygen tubes, the failure of organs. Asking that question, how much longer do we fight? That is scary and I don't know how I am going to handle it. I get upset now with medicine and going into the hospital every year. I think it is absolutely torture to try to keep me alive after a certain point of lung disease. What is most uncomfortable to me is deciding when I don't want to thrive anymore. It is how I'll die that is the scariest not death.

The average age for a cystic fibrosis patient is 37. I try so hard to not let that be a time line for me. But I do consider it and that is what living life to the fullest is all about. It is why I drive a sports car. It is why I want to be married before my late twenties. It is why I don't see myself having children. It is why my parents do so much for me and we really could careless about me having a career. Because when you are faced with a shortened life, you just take death as death and choose the best options possible for your life. Now, standing on the healthy side of the spectrum at the moment, I can say I'm not bothered by dying young. I'm not upset at the idea of death. Put me in the hospital and all these fancy justifications would be harder to say. Of course I don't want to die young, put my parents through burying a child, not being able to experience more. I started an IRA Roth at 18, to mock CF statistics that I would be around to draw from for my retirement. Now though I'm not so sure I do want to live that long. I get easily tired now, I can't imagine what a 60 year old body would feel like. So knowing that, I live with a different perspective that for the most part is a lot of plain acceptance of reality. Instead of dreaming of what I'll do when I get older, I do it now to enjoy life. I've always joked well at least what I die of won't be a surprise! I have the gift of living with a disease. Not being shocked about a diagnosis 50 years down the line and thinking of all the things I could have done. I can say death is death, because I only have life now.

I think death is hardest when you have regrets. When your relationships with others are not where you want them to be. When there is so much untapped potential and suddenly it is gone. That's where my faith comes in. There is no way that I could be writing all this without my faith in God. I hated when people would say, I can't wait to get to heaven. I would just think, well you don't have a reason to get there quick and I do. Heaven is real to me, but I can't fully comprehend it, like I can't really be joyful about it, because I have absolutely no idea what God is preparing for us. I don't like all the revelations and end of the world scenarios, all I think about is running with out grasping for air into the horizon of beautiful sunset colors. Being able to laugh for the rest of eternity. Eternity is really a concept I struggle with, I love the clock and I just can't fully justify no end. So I just figure it is this life, never ending, which is what everyone wants, immortality, the fountain of youth. You just have to struggle through. Jesus life has been a comfort to me as well. He only lived 33 years. Always knowing that, I've felt that God was telling me that his plan for me will work out quickly. And once I meet God's will, he rewards me with Heaven. He doesn't want me to suffer on this earth any longer then I have too. The ministry of Jesus was 3 short years. He started when He was 30, in our society today he would have been a first rate slacker and highly criticized for living with his mother. Ok, he wasn't living at home, he traveled with his friends, sweet life. Still, God called upon Him when the time was right and He called him home when the time was right. It is the same for my life, I've been called to live this experience. I might as well make the most of it. I can either be upset that one day I won't be living or live right up to that day the way I want too.