The last of my mother's living family, besides a few long-lost cousins, Devin, and myself, is currently dying in a shared room at the FutureCare center in Dundalk. I don't take to sick old people very well. Especially sick old people with whom I've spent a decent amount of my life. Like my Aunt Cora, the one sitting at the nursing home, waiting to die. When my grandmother, the woman who half raised me, was dying, I made efforts to not have to go and see her. It's disappointing and very upsetting to see a person you loved so much in so much pain, and that's never a way you want to remember someone. Eventually my mother managed to guilt trip me into going to see Aunt Cora with her this evening, and when we walked into the room my Aunt looked at me and burst into tears. Tears, coming from the eyes of this bald, shrunken, sack with the face of the woman who taught me how to play Gin Rummy. And instead of saying "hello", or "I haven't seen you since you were still in school!", she tells me "You are your grandmother's granddaughter. Oh my God you look exactly like she did when she was your age". And this is why I don't take well to sick, old people; it's because of the fucking things they say.

It's probably because I spent an angst-filled year of my teenage life studying the fine arts of Wicca that I have weird thoughts about death and the possibility of an afterlife. I think that people who are actively dying are actually downloading the knowledge of the Universe at a speed that is directly proportional to the speed with which they are dying. I don't mean "actively dying" as in people my age who are inching towards death, barring any unforeseen accidents along the way. I mean people who are the process of having their internal organs switched off on a daily, or even hourly basis. I feel that this is just another one of life's cruel jokes, the ultimate in hindsight facepalms; you spend an entire lifetime attempting to carve out your personal niche in this world we've developed, then you receive the pertinent information as you're dying. This situation would be the "cherry on top", the big "fuck you" of the Universe, and it is this situation that leads me to believe that people who are dying have very important things to say. If you can wade through the gibberish, you might have access to a piece of Universal Knowledge, and I'm not sure that we're supposed to know about any of that shit until we've started dying.

So before going into the nursing home, my mother and I sat in her car, and she told me to keep my cool, "don't fall apart in front of Aunt Cora, she doesn't need to see that we're upset". We finished our cigarettes and began walking through the crumbling parking lot toward the squealing automatic doors. There were three elderly men sitting in rusty wheel chairs, armed with oxygen tanks, smoking cigarettes directly next to these doors; glaring at us for our walking legs, the orange light of the evening sun setting fire to the windows of their souls. The look of them sent chills directly to my urethra, bypassing my bladder entirely. The peanut butter sandwich and large diet coke, no ice I had for lunch immediately sank to the ass end of my intestines. I avoided eye contact with them as best I could, besides the fact that these old men seemed dangerous, looking at old people in general is depressing; it's a glimpse into a future that I'd rather not see right now. "These bitter old men think that just because they're dying, there's no use in paying any attention to the safety of others? So much for keeping my cool. I've managed to be dragged into a place where people go to die, and well, I'm going to die. Thanks, Mom", I muttered to her as we walked out of the old men's hearing aids' earshot and into the center's lobby.

My aunt has a rather secluded room, away from the hustle and bustle of the rest of the center; this is assuming that there's much of any hustling or bustling going on in a nursing home. There was an old man sitting by himself in a corner of the hallway, just sitting in a wheelchair, staring at what I believe was his reflection in the curtained window of the nurse's lounge. I can only imagine how it feels to look at yourself when you're that old and sick, knowing about your life before this state. I'd rather lose my memory if that's the case. There were carts piled with mostly uneaten plates of food, children's food; pudding, grilled cheese and tomato soup, goldfish crackers, mashed potatoes. If the Lion King were about people, "The Circle of Life" would have contained more lyrics about old people, and how you come out in diapers and leave in diapers, you come out with no teeth and leave with no teeth. Ah, it's the circle of life, and it rules us all.

So when Aunt Cora looked at me and started crying and going on about my grandmother, the fiber-bulked shit that had been growing since the silent death threats from the trio of oldheads dropped, and was being held in by only a thread. The other half of my lunch seemed to have traveled upwards and lodged itself in my throat, but of course that was just the lump that always accompanies tears. I made a dying woman cry. She's on oxygen, so I'm not sure that crying is in her best interests. I could have killed her. I'm not sure what upset me more; her crying or her mentioning my grandmother. Conversation ensues, and I admit that I was only half listening; I was too preoccupied with thoughts of my own mortality, my ambiguous feelings towards Aunt Cora's receipt of Universal knowledge, and the various medical equipment in the room to be bothered with conversation. I was grateful for the distractions though, I had the loosest possible grip on my cool, and I needed to focus on not going to the bathroom in a nursing home.

As it turns out, I don't think Aunt Cora is dying hard enough to be receiving any great amount of knowledge. She's too coherent, too... alive to know things. That eased the pressure in my guts a little, knowing that I wouldn't be accidentally be exposed to any information that would open me up to a possible real life "Final Destination" scenario. Removing the thought of choking on the dinner I had no idea when I'd be eating made the visit a little more pleasant, but still no where near pleasant. I was still in a nursing home surrounded by death and people who have given up. I was still visiting with a person who was not only dying, but had also accepted this fact. I was still visiting with a woman who eerily resembles my grandmother as she was dying, and this was the thing that upset me the most this evening.

The thing that upset me second most was that I didn't get to eat dinner until 8:30, after I stopped by the grocery store as I had originally planned to do before going to visit "Death Becomes Her", picked up a salad at the salad bar, came home to eat the salad, then proceeded to spill the contents of a one pound salad after I had only consumed ten bites.

I shrugged the salad off. After seeing old people who are dying due to certain life choices, I figured that I wouldn't miss the extra calories or the rise in blood pressure from getting pissed at such trivial things.