Thoughts on Mortality
Content warning: Medical trauma, frank discussion of life and death.
I haven't really listened to a lot of metal/rock music as I get older. Part of it is being easily overstimulated, having sensitive ears... Tinnitus, etc. However, there's something particularly moving about Ozzy Osbourne's death, especially considering the effort he put into his last concert.
People have a tendency to think Parkinson's is an old person's disease, despite it being on the rise and young people not being completely immune from developing it. Michael J. Fox was in his 30s when he started getting symptoms. When my dad was diagnosed during the pandemic, I saw this woman in her 30s talking about her diagnosis online on TikTok (I'm no longer using TikTok because, mainly, it was too addicting, and the potential on-and-off ban discouraged me from being attached to it). It made me slightly paranoid about developing it earlier than my dad. Although having a parent is not a guarantee that the offspring will obtain Parkinson's, they are at a slightly increased risk than the average population. Every time I'm jittery, I remind myself that it's from my caffeine addiction, or my blood sugar is too low (having coffee and one banana isn't much of a breakfast). I do that finger tapping exercise to put my brief anxiety at ease.
It's also still relatively perceived by most people as a thing with tremors and nothing else. It's not just tremors. Your body can just randomly freeze up, causing you to fall. My dad is in an assisted living facility, but it took him at least over a year to get there because how deceptive this disease can make you look almost independent and relatively fine one day, and completely debilitated the next. There was an entire week where I begged him to go to the hospital, after him not being able to stand up on his own. I called 911 three times, and he refused until the third time, after having a discussion with a nurse who couldn't do anything without a diagnosis. Eventually, after a suspected stroke, and several tests, he was discovered to have a broken hip.
The dementia, mood swings and impaired judgement from this disease is also deceptive. He spent thousands on supplements, tried to convince me that he was financially fine despite getting into a pyramid scheme, attempted to drive when his nurses told him not to (when he was recovering from hip surgery), the weird eating habits... It's just a whole CVS receipt of confounding situations that made me feel like I was having an out-of-body experience. He was showing tremor symptoms at least five years before his diagnosis but he was fiercely stubborn and independent and gaslit me into thinking some of the decisions he was making were normal. He convinced my mother that he was curing his disease through supplements somehow and every attempt at my concerns that he was deluding himself were shut down, until he couldn't delude anyone anymore.
The broken-hip situation was two summers ago. I live in my own space now, in a no-contact situation with my parents. I feel like I should be over it by now, and to some extent, I am, but I can't help but think if I'm making the most of my life or not. There are strands of grey hairs prematurely showing up on my scalp. I'm not getting younger. No one is. I can accept death but I can't accept wasting my life. I'm nearing the end of a college degree that might be (hopefully, not, but might be) mostly useless when finished. I don't know what I'm going to do with it after it's done, but I want to be useful in this life. It's difficult not knowing what kind of useful.