I Made a Mistake and I Can't Stop Thinking about Death

 

I made a mistake last night and I can't stop thinking about death.

Last night before I went to bed I heard a strange sound. I could not identify or locate it. I am hearing impaired. I went to bed.

 

This morning I realized, with real horror, what the strange sound was.

 

I immediately, and intensely, hated myself.

 

My body was wracked with fear. I can feel that fear in every cell right now, hours later.

 

Last night, I made a terrible mistake. I don't want to go into details, but my mistake was the source of the sound. I'm going to have to pay for this, with real dollars, and, what's worse, my mistake could have resulted in a fire.

 

Yesterday, the same day I made the terrible mistake that made a lot of noise, noise I so stupidly could not identify, I forgot a prayer. I was praying my rosary – and I pray the rosary *every day* – I totally forgot the words to one of the prayers. My mind was a blank.

 

My father died of Alzheimer's. His sister had it, too. None of my siblings has had it, but my siblings have a habit of dying very young. Very few twenty-three or thirty-four year olds with Alzheimer's.

 

I don't know if I made the mistake because of Alzheimer's. The sad truth is, I've been "cognitively different" my entire life. That being the case, the mistake I made last night might have been just me being me.

 

I am dyslexic and ADHD. When I was in school, there were no terms for this, at least not known to the nuns. I was possessed, obstreperous, obnoxious, defiant … in fact I was none of those things. I really couldn't tell why my work so enraged my teachers. So I divorced myself from people. I also divorced myself from people because of the beatings and the abuse. Who wants to be connected to people who call you fat pig retard bitch?

 

Being divorced from people cocooned me from the abuse, but it also advanced my cluelessness. It took me forever to learn how to operate a washing machine, how to write a check, how to drive a car.

 

I live in an era of rapid technological advances. I don't even know what most of the gadgets I hear people talk about are. I've never played a video game and I have no idea what such games entail. I don't know what the word "Pacman" refers to. I don't want to know. Two people were kind enough to give me I-Pod shuffles. I never learned to use them. I tried to give them away but now I understand no one uses them any more.

 

We live in an era of grievance. Everyone is a victim or victimizer. I'm supposed to feel pissed off because I am a woman. I am not pissed off because I am a woman.

 

If I were going to start screaming and punching and rioting, it would be over how cognitively different people are treated. With contempt. Sneered at, laughed at, pushed past. I've never had the teacher I've needed. In fact I've had very few teachers at all, and most were not in the so-called "schools." Nepali peasant women and my peasant Uncle John in Slovakia taught me more than many a "teacher."

 

And no it's not funny when you laugh at me when I can't differentiate between left and right. It's not cute when you get angry at me because it takes me two minutes longer than it takes you to read a restaurant menu. You aren't being helpful when you rush me to leave the house before I've done the little ritual that assures me that everything that is supposed to be turned off is turned off, and everything that is supposed to be in my backpack is in my backpack.

 

No justice, no peace. Nah. No rioting for me. But yeah, I am angry. At all of you.

 

I am alone. If I lived with someone else, that someone else would have noticed my big, potentially disastrous blunder yesterday that left me in danger of starting a fire. Especially if that person has normal hearing.

 

But there is no such person. I am alone.

 

Mindful of my father's decline, and how he relied on my mother to shepherd him to his final days, and how alone I am, I have promised myself: If I see the signs that I can't function cognitively any more, I need to leave.

 

Forgetting my prayer yesterday, and making that big mistake that could have resulted in a fire, but, blessedly, didn't, I wonder if that day is drawing near.

 

I think, right now, about all the other old, alone, people out there thinking the same thoughts, making the same plans.

 

There will never be a march for us. We just slip away, quietly.