LIFE ARCHIVED

 

I have just finished archiving 12 years of my writing on line. It represents just over one half of my twenty years of self-publishing on line. When I started in 1998 as part of my recovery from a collapsed immune system, I did not expect to live two years, let alone another twenty. AIDS, which had killed so many of my patients through the 1990's, had come close to killing me. I took my reprieve seriously. Even today, I routinely summon the faces and decimated bodies of those I nursed in a residential AIDS hospice before I myself fell ill. I live always in part for them. 

Assuming responsibility for carrying on with integrity for something greater than myself has helped to sustain me through some pretty miserable experiences. Today my immune system is the best it has been since years before my terminal prognosis in 1996. I daily appreciate with gratitude the companionship of a life partner whom I met fifteen years ago, at a time when I was struggling with the aftermath of cancer treatments. 

Life did not stop because I was sick. I have had to work hard to maintain my economic survival in an increasingly predatory capitalist country. I still work with the resources I have as a retired person to live well, not luxuriously by any means. Both my parents died over the last two decades. When my mother developed brain cancer in 2011 at 91, I was there for her day by day until she died. Like my experiences with caring for my AIDS patients, this experience of letting go of the source of my own life has brought growth beyond words. 

Constructing Paul Creeden Archived gave me an opportunity to take a rare look back down the path I have traveled. I am not nostalgic by nature. And, with the past I have had for more than three decades, review often entails painful and exhausting recollections. I have lost more than patients to AIDS. I have lost lovers and good friends as well. Recalling my cancer treatments of 2002-2003 makes me realize how my daily life is challenged by radiation damage, incurred at that time. I usually just take these inconveniences and pains for granted. 

My favorite Japanese Buddhist saying is: Turn poison into medicine. This is based on the parables of the Lotus Sutra. It is especially relevant to a life sustained by exquisitely crafted pharmacology with unknown long term side effects. I also relate this saying from Buddhism to Nietzsche's concept that what doesn't kill a person makes him/her stronger. I have learned to apply this basic concept to many interpersonal problems and downturns in my life.

I write now to pass on what I can from my journey. I do not mean to be preachy. Some readers have said I sound like I am "above it all" in my observations about life. Perhaps I am at times. I know that part of dying sometimes entails seeing your body from some height above yourself on your death bed. Two people whose hands I held as they died told me this as it was happening to them. I guess I already live partly in the world and partly outside of it. My words are shared freely for you to read. Make of them, and me, what you will.