synchronicity, mortality

This week I've had to contend with hospital visits, X-rays, MRIs, and all the other fun things that come along as a result of a malformed c5 vertebra. I've experienced the tingly fingertips, and the acute back pain and the SOMA drug trips. It's nothing serious (just some pinched nerves), but it's becoming an incredible lesson in the value of my life, appropriately arriving at the cusp of my 29th birthday.

Let's chat Synchronicity first. I remember the college Ethics class where the word first came up, and The Artist's Way that I used to quote like the bible, and that book I adopted afterward, The Celestine Prophecy. I must've used "synchronicity" a million times in the days when I was working as an artist's apprentice in South Florida, and I can almost recall word-for-word a conversation I had with a boyfriend about the difference between "synchronicity" and the more frivolous, pedestrian "serendipity". ("By coincidence and by accident are, like, totally different things," I'm sure we told each other.) Well, a few days ago, sitting in the passenger's seat of my own car as I'm being driven to the pharmacy for the second time in forty-eight hours, I found myself thinking of Synchronicity again.

The thing is, I've been picking up bits about death and dying recently. A lot of them. One friend just told me about a co-worker who, though he's in his 30's, is dying of cancer. My writing group is critiquing a (really great, honest and riveting) story about caskets and suicide. Yesterday on Oprah (which I don't watch, but which happened to be on in the lobby at work, where I found myself working on a project for a couple of hours), there was an update on the woman who, after finding out she was terminally ill, made videos of herself dispensing advice to her baby daughter. (The daughter is now a lovely 13 year old, and her father is about to remarry.) And as a captive audience during the 20-minute MRI, I heard an NPR piece about a man who recorded a "journal" of his deterioration from the moment he learned he had an inoperable brain tumor to the day he could no longer form coherent sentences.

I could come up with many more examples, but the point is that death seems to be all around me lately, and I wondered, is mortality a subject that is really coming up more than usual? Or am I just more sensitive to it now that I am feeling sick and scared, the way that I started noticing more Scion xB's after I got one of my own?

I decided to keep open to death-related news and here are some things I've discovered...

The bird flu is going to infect/kill free-range poultry first, because, ironically, the chickens are able to run around in less-protected areas. [CityPages]

According to People magazine [Apr.3], Andrea Yates recently learned of her June 22 capital murder retrial (and her ex-husband's new marriage), a man named David Swain may have killed his wife while scuba diving on vacation, there's more "shocking evidence" surrounding Princess Diana's death (like, an illegal embalming procedure may have hidden a pregnancy) and the super-elegant, amazing fashion designer Oleg Cassini just passed away.

American military casualties in Iraq since the start of the war (in March of '03) has reached 2,327. [antiwar.com]

Nobody knows where the man who invented the ferris wheel–G.W. Ferris–was buried. [picked this up in a coversation]

On CNN...the last Pope's last words were "read me the Bible", an earthquake killed 66 Iranians, the wild coyote who was captured in NYC died while being released, and the guy who played "Zorro" on tv is recently deceased.

And for something too fucked up to describe, check out www.LifeGem.com

So, I'm discovering these things as I'm being illuminated into the "quirks" of my body, the things that I cannot change, the things that I'll have to learn to live with and that will affect the kind of life I lead. I'm also about to celebrate my birthday, and I'll be doing it with my first grey hair and ten pounds too many. I'm a little down on me (on how few friends I keep in touch with, on how messy my closet is, on how much tension I carry around every day) and I can't help feeling that all the data I've been collecting lately is more than just random happenstance. My brain is trying to make out the pattern, it's squinting at this bizarro connect-the-dots, but I haven't come up with the life lesson yet...