One of my favorite and most often-quoted poems was written by Richard Brautigan and included in his beautifully-titled collection, Loading Mercury With a Pitchfork. I can’t find my copy at present so I will have to rely on my fragile memory to recall it. Please forgive any errors, and I put XX since I don’t recall the exact ages.
Claudia
Her mother still living is XX
Her grandmother still living is XX
“People in my family live a long time!”
Claudia always used to say laughing
What a surprise she had
What a succinct summation of a life!
When I was young, and in spite of being a Catholic, I had a Ouija Board. (We were less worried about being possessed by demonic forces and being made to eat babies back then.) One day my mother asked how old she would be when she would die. The planchette moved to “8” then “3.” And in the intervening years we forgot about that.
When she was 83 she had a health crisis that led her to being in nursing homes for the rest of her life. No thanks to a geriatric physician (“Well, she is getting older”) and unhelpful nursing home staff (“She has dementia”) who wrote her off; and when she got to a better nursing home, they found no evidence of dementia and she did pretty well for quote some time. She finally passed away at the age of 92, just 3 months shy of her 93rd birthday. So the Ouija Board was half right.
I think about her (and I inherited her genetics so I have all her ills as well) and other relatives whose holy cards I have from funerals, and I feel like Claudia. They did all live a long time!
And then, this week, I suddenly developed a high fever. I sweated so much during the night that my pillow and all the bedclothes down to the mattress pad were soaked. I had a regular doctor’s appointment, where flu and covid tests turned up negative, but did get an EKG and Holter monitor for another issue. Last night I slept in the guest bed with pretty much the same result.
I’m hoping I’m past this, and am just tired and dehydrated. Because I‘d like to have that longer life. But at the moment, I really need to get better.
MUSOFYR 
OoooOOOOoooo my! I sure hope you feel better soon. Over the past weekend, I had a health scare. A kidney infection from a UTI infection did not heal after a first round of antibiotics. In the hospital ER, the doctor told me I had a bactrim, tetracycline, and penicillin resistant form of E. coli. When told this information I responded, “Oh s–t!”. After I apologized, the doctor assured me that I had not offended him. Fortunately, there is a third-generation antibiotic to which I am responding well. If this doesn’t work, due to my drug allergies, I will have to check into the hospital for a few days of IV antibiotics. I still have gardening to do, friends to help, men to love, coffee to drink, and chocolate to melt in my mouth.
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