Do you support euthanasia?

I woke up in the middle of the night to growling bowels.  This was when I learned that growling bowels in the middle of the night is a sign.  A terrible sign.  I got to the bathroom and couldn't decide which end to put over the toilet first.  My head won and my underwear lost.

Wasn't I empty yet?  How could there be more?  The consistency and color changed, but it didn't stop the heaving and churning.  I lost a concept of time, knowing only my traitorous body.  When I finished heaving, I would kneel before the sink and rinse my burning mouth.  Eventually, I couldn't get up high enough to reach the water taps.  I no longer cared about the cleanliness of the bathroom floor, the toilet or myself.  I wanted the agony of my quivering digestive system to end, and I didn't care how.

My head lay on the curved carpet that hugged the front of the toilet.  I made bargains in my head.  Please don't let me throw up again.  Please calm down.  Please don't open me up and flush me out again.  If I hold really, really still, will you stop?

24 hour flu.  One day of my life.  I lay there, shaking my head slowly from side to side, willing my body to obey, but my thoughts were detached, too.  If I had to feel like this all the time, like a cancer patient in treatment, could I make it?  Would I want to?  My frightened, honest voice said I would rather die than feel like this.

325

When you hurt yourself or become sick, your very first thought is to berate yourself for not appreciating the times when you felt fine.  "Why didn't I appreciate being able to sit without pain?"  "Why didn't I appreciate being able to breathe?"  "Why didn't I appreciate being able to concentrate?"

Take a moment now and assess yourself.  How do you feel?  Are you sitting comfortably?  If not, adjust your body or even change your seat.  Relax your shoulders and straighten your neck.  Take a deep breath, in and out.  In and out.  Are you good?  Sit back and appreciate your wellness for a moment.  Even if you aren't 100%, appreciate what you have.  It could be worse, right?  Always.  After all, the dead aren't reading this book.

270

It was the folded pieces of washed tinfoil in her dead grandmother's kitchen pantry that put Samantha over the edge.  Picturing how her grandmother had used, rinsed and carefully put away the tinfoil for a future time she would never see caused Sam to burst into tears.  Even the word "tinfoil" was her grandmother's; her own mother teased her for using such an old-fashioned word for "aluminum foil".  Sunk to the floor holding the folded pieces, Sam cried and, in an oddly detached way, thought about why it made her so sad.  Missing her grandmother?  Certainly.  There were always loving words and compliments unsaid, questions unasked.  She cried for herself.  No, she thought, she cried for humans.  Humans who lived as if they would continue to live forever.  Humans who set aside for the future.  Humans who had plans in the calendar.  Humans who had saved candles because they were too nice to burn for any "regular" occasion and waited, unburned, perhaps forever.

268

Georgina missed the part of her life where she had been good-looking.  Granted, it hadn't been for long, but she didn't realize it until a decade past; that was the way it went with her.  Realizations came suddenly and far too late.  At least, she thought at her reflection, they came eventually.  She patted her graying hair, which was also thinning and thickening at the same time, before another realization: it didn't matter.  Georgina felt that realization release a weight which dropped to the floor with a clunk.  It didn't matter.  She was light-headed with relief.  A narrow tunnel she had been traveling down that ended in darkness now opened up into a rotunda with exits on all sides pointing to sunlight.  It didn't matter.  Hair, face, skin, shape, color, clothes, breakfast, likes, dislikes, opinions: none of it mattered.  Better late than never, she thought, leaving her house and pointedly not taking her phone or brushing her hair.

253

What haunted Miranda at every step was a one-word question: Why?  Her worn hiking boots crunched on the frozen leaves and snapped twigs.  Right foot: Why?  Left foot: Why?  Right foot: Why am I here?  Left foot: Why am I still here?  Right foot: Why am I so stupid?  Left foot: Why did I agree?  Right foot: Why don't I just stop?  Left foot: Why am I still walking?

Miranda hoisted her pack higher and tightened the straps again, all the while taking one step after the other.

247

The sheets were blessedly cool and smooth, and the pillow so soft.  Janet eased into bed, making sure she enjoyed every moment of lying down.  Naps, she felt, had been under-appreciated so far in her life, and she didn't want to waste another one by ignoring the beautiful feeling of weariness slipping into rest.  Though her muscles ached, Janet used them to sink inch by inch into a bed that had never, ever felt this good.  Her feet sighed with relief and she stretched her toes.  She released her tied eyes from their increasingly fuzzy work and closed them to better experience the release of her body.  As she drifted away, a space far back in Janet's mind lamented a life ahead with limited opportunities for naps and she reiterated to herself the pledge not to let another nap go without full engagement in the experience.

236

The impossible is possible.  Famous people are more boring than you'd think.  Every living thing with a brain has doubts.  Shay curled, shivering, under her blanket and thought about all she'd learned the past few months.  Death is always near.  Most people are just going through the motions.  The impossible is possible.  She kept going back to the most uplifting and frightening revelation.  The grate began to vibrate.  Shay held her blanket down on all corners to keep in the warm gust that always followed when a train was coming into the station below.  The impossible is possible.  The impossible is possible.

224

As Claudia was barfing into her handbag, she reflected on her life and was rather disappointed.  Women in their late 30s should not be barfing without the influence of the stomach flu or undercooked meat, yet here she was, shoulders hunched over her cheap, gold purse, trying not to barf so loudly that the cabbie would kick her out.

Pulling up to her apartment building, Claudia handed the cab driver a twenty with two fingers.  The ride only cost ten, but since all her money smelled like vomit, she thought he could use the tip.  Claudia fumbled with the door handle and slumped halfway out, knock-kneed in her short skirt and heels.

175

She dreamed of water again.  Whenever Gala dreamed of water, it was either wonderful or a disaster.  She knew the disastrous water dreams were the result of a face full of pillow and her inevitable drowning caused her to gasp herself awake and roll over.  The wonderful water dreams were few and far between, but she remembered them all.  These were the kinds of dreams she pondered, trying to find a connection to her waking life, and wondering what they signaled.  Some recurring dreams she had figured out, like the elevator that took crazy zigs and zags, never going to the floor she selected, but shooting about without warning.  Elevator dreams meant "change".  The future was a question mark and worrying her in daytime life, so her elevator dreams proved it was out of her control.  The water dreams, though.  They were another story.

In her most recent dream, Gala was with British actor Benedict Cumberbatch, known to her mostly for his portrayal of a modern Sherlock Holmes.  She smiled when thinking about that because most females either loved him or were left scratching their heads over why most females loved him.  Gala thought he was interesting-looking, which is why he showed up in her dream as an extension of herself.  In her analysis, she hoped her "interesting" looks made her attractive, so Benedict Cumberbatch showed up.  She had a rather large nose, and a long face, and small eyes and a long body and loose joints.  The description of herself in her own head annoyed her with its negativity, but she let it lie because in the scope of the dream she knew he wasn't the most important part.  The most important part was the feeling.

144

Walking is a miracle.  Like the giant bumblebee that shouldn't be able to fly with its tiny wings, humans walking is not fully explainable.  Walking is falling.  You fling yourself off balance and, at the very last moment, you catch yourself with your other foot, and you do this over and over and over again: walking.  Perhaps it is a metaphor for life.  You fling yourself forward with reckless abandon, considering all the bad that could befall you, and catch yourself at the last moment.  You don't know how you make it, but somehow you're moving forward.  It's a miracle, but you manage, and, sometimes, you can even chew gum while you do it.

142

The wind rustled the trees and Lee tried to listen to it without the hoarse car muffler and underlying hiss of unseen traffic.  She wondered what it would have been like a hundred, two hundred, a thousand years before.  What could you hear?  Perhaps she wouldn't have courted ear damage from the summer concerts, either, and been able to hear the silence even better.

131

Observation is the first step towards enlightenment, but you'll never do it correctly. You will observe only through the filter of your body's feelings and your mind's memories. Your experience colors your perceptions and there is nothing upon which you may look that isn't referenced from your own viewpoint.

So forget enlightenment. I'd recommend you try for inner peace, but that is also impossible given the turbulence of the mind.

76

I sat backwards, facing the domed hatchback window, looking at the driver behind us look at me. I was knees to chin sitting where the television would go on the new-to-us entertainment center that only just fit inside my Plymouth Horizon. The man and woman in the Volvo behind us smiled, so I waved and they laughed. As I hugged by shins and tried not to get carsick, I continued to wonder, as I had for days, if buying more furniture with someone I wasn't completely sold on was a good idea.

37

Louis was one of those people who never tried as hard as they could because if they did and still fell short, it would mean they weren't good enough. If Louis never tried as hard as he could, then he could always tell himself that if he had only tried harder, he would have succeeded. Berating oneself as lazy was infinitely better than being an actual failure.

It was during his late thirties that Louis realized he was one of those people. He was in the middle of berating himself for once again missing the deadline for a writing submission when his synapses finally let him know it was not laziness at all; it was fear of trying.

The knowledge hit Louis like a sidekick to the chest and he numbly thought it must have been what Adam and Eve felt after eating the Forbidden Fruit. He sat down on the floor of his one bedroom apartment and cried because this kind of enlightenment didn't go away.

29

I went to sleep with a gun in my mouth, and now that I'm awake I'm wondering what made me fail to finish the job. I don't mean in a "I'm such a puss" kind of way, but rather a serious, "Why didn't I?" kind of reflection. There must have been something I thought was worth living for, or some idea, a plan, a hope, a guardian angel; if only I could remember what it was.