It's Simple. It's Not Easy, But It's Simple.

When I returned to Florida from NW Louisiana in 1991, I was shellshocked and desperately ill. I'd just lost my profession, my career, everything I'd worked so hard for, going to college when I was 25 and graduating in only two years with my high-grade degree.

I junked my car for $100 and couldn't replace it; it had died. My fiance almost did, and might as well have; it turned out he was living a phony life, he wasn't who he said he was. I accidentally discovered this by going through his personal papers while boxing up his possessions to return to his mother, since the doctors told me he wouldn't survive. That entire summer of 1991, just before my return here, was packed full of horrors and losses on a terrible scale.

Finally, in August, I'd come back on a Florida visit to help care for my grandmother, dying from lung cancer. She passed away a few days after I got here. I noticed that my allergies, which had become absolutely debilitating in NW Louisiana, were sort of tolerable here. My doc said it wouldn't last more than 6 months to 2 years, and then they might ratchet up even worse. I was already supposed to be dead from them, so *far worse* didn't sound good.

I told him I really needed to get out of there, and that even a small amount of healthier time would be worth it.

It was.

It lasted 8 months. When it was over, the resurgence of the constant semi-anaphylactic condition I lived in was extraordinary. It was dramatic and scary, horribly sickening, and I dealt with it when I was completely alone, without financial resources, and too sick to simply care for my two cats and my orchids, much less a person who was seriously ill.

I went through a sort of hurricane-prep whirl of activity and then shut myself inside in the most controlled-air environment I could achieve on my limited means. Back inside my bubble I went, and sealed the door.

And then I physically collapsed.

I still wonder at myself, at how I was even able to do what I did to prepare. I can only surmise that it's like when a 100 pound mother gets a surge of adrenalin and lifts up the car that just rolled onto her child.

Massive doses of steroids are part of what saved my life; and of course, also part of what sickened me so. The complex biochemistry of the allergic attacks, coupled with my autoimmune rheumatoid arthritis, undiagnosed hypothryroid, handfuls of steroids and other meds, and the lingering PTSD from that bloody, deadly summer in Louisiana had me half crazy.

I slept around 18 hours per day. Often I couldn't speak. My mind was intact but like many in a serious allergic state, I had trouble making the thoughts come out of my mouth in words. And that was when I even had a voice: I have dysphonia, vocal cord dysfunction, and often lost my voice entirely for days or weeks at a time.

So I slept, and I thought.

I'd lost everything. My health, my career, my fiance, almost all of my possessions. My health insurance. There was no telling if I'd get any better, or by how much. Me, suffused with restless wanderlust, who'd moved 35 times in a 10 year period - I was now a permanent shut-in.

The overall physical pain wasn't as bad then as now. But the overwhelming sense of sickness was even worse than today. Dizziness too; one of my few ventures out of my apartment had me falling, backwards, down the stairs. My heart was doing strange things. No matter how short I cut my nails, the bouts of itching left me bloody from head to toe, especially when I slept.

I got bronchitis, badly, and I was already allergic to several antibiotics. My allergist/internist would listen to my lungs and shake his head, and he said:

--The infection has settled around your old pneumonia scars. Both lungs. It hasn't clotted yet, it's not pneumonia yet, but it's only a hairsbreadth away. Better get ready.

Oh, I was sick. Fevers and chills, and that stabbing pain in the lungs. Rattling wheezing gasping coughing choking nauseating breath.

I was so tired.

I was so very tired, and my soul was sick and I was heartbroken and devastated and I slept and thought and slept and thought and I didn't seem able to figure out a reason to live.

It was more than just, --What meaningful future could I possibly have?

It was this: --Who needed me to stay alive?

There was no one who couldn't easily do without me.

My family, especially back then, was not particularly close in the way many are about health needs at least. They helped me financially, for which I'll always be grateful, but they completely failed to understand or take much interest in what was happening to me. The now brain-damaged shell of a human that I'd briefly thought I would marry was no longer stalking me; that was good; but certainly any hope of a relationship there would have been a sickness of its own. My friends, including many fine people I'd left behind in Louisiana, were all scattered far and wide; none were in South Florida. My wonderful grandmother Jean, who'd lived two blocks away from my new Florida apartment, was dead.

I knew that I was so sick that dying would be easy. Relatively painless, even, considering how I already felt. I was so close to double pneumonia, the bronchitis wasn't responding much to the antibiotics, and I was reeling from the medications and the relentless battering of biochemicals released from a constant state of near-anaphylactic shock.

I didn't need to commit suicide, you see. All I had to do was give up. Call it over, throw in the towel, go to sleep again and just...stay that way. It tempted me, it pulled at me the way frigid cold calls out to a lost wanderer to just lie down, it's not cold, really it feels warm if you lie down in the snow, go to sleep, go to sleep...

The two beings who saved my life were not humans. They were my two cats.

I'd thought about them. Of course. But I knew my family would, at least, find them a home with people who loved them and were good to them.

The difference was this: No matter how good those new people might be, they wouldn't be the same. They wouldn't love my cats the same way I did. The cats would always remember me and wonder, as animals do, why I went away and didn't come back for them.

They might be perfectly happy after a time, but it would not be the same. I loved them in my own way, I slept with them and held hands and sang them songs and played with them, and they knew how much I loved them. We were so extremely bonded, people would joke about them being my familiars.

Trivial? Silly? Childish?

No.

It was enough. It was enough to make me decide to live, to keep on going. To fight again.

So I did.

And I won.

And my life is incredibly different now. Even the optimist that I am - and I certainly am - I couldn't have hoped for it to turn around as much as it did. To just be able to buy a house, when you're permanently disabled and living on the tiny income from Social Security? But I'd met Walter - a miracle, how in the world does a shut-in meet anyone, much less the husband I couldn't find in 20 years of searching? And it took both our incomes to buy the house. I actually mattered financially to our little family of two humans and two cats.

I say all this to you now because of a comment left by Snog Dot on my *not pneumonia* post. He said:

I just don't know how you keep going.

How?

Simple.

Because of people like you.

You kept going while the love of your life, who you'd finally found after looking for such a long time, slowly died, and you cared for her and loved her every minute. You keep going today, being a great dad for your kids, while your heart must be torn in two and your soul exhausted.

My blog sis Livey not only survived a violent, vicious childhood, but cancer and a list of maladies that goes side-by-side with mine. Her progress through the mental and physical damage she sustained is just breathtaking, it's like watching the sun make rainbows toward the end of the storm.

pepektheassassin survived cancer too. That's what her book, Chrysalis, is about. Her husband, the only man she ever said *I love you* to, has seven stents in his heart. Seven. She was there for him, as he was for her, and they both made it through. Yet the grace and beauty and pure fun of her writing makes me forget her hardships all the time.

Walrilla recently lost his foot to infection. And the other leg's infected too, has been for a year. I know he's had a lot to grapple with, but my God, it's hard to see it. He's strong and brave and cheerful and sweet and fierce looking as always, and he works through the bad patches with a quiet will. He's so excited about the upcoming blogmeet I bet it's curling his goatee.

Jean lost her husband to suicide. There's often an element of spite in a suicide, where they want to inflict as much emotional agony on the survivor as they can. I don't know the circumstances surrounding this one, but I do know it hurt her badly. Yet she won't give up hope. She wraps us up in her poetry and prose and I hope, one day, to see her glass art too.

Nancy has spinal stenosis and more, and after surgery to correct it, now they tell her there's nothing more they can do. That's not easy to hear. She can't be a teacher any more, and that woman was born to be a teacher, it's in her from head to toe. Lord, just look at her garden. It's lovely. I have to sit down to garden, to weed and such. She has to LIE down. And so she does, and loves her time out there.

Desert Cat, my brilliant and beloved blogdad, has had troubles of his own. Many of them arise from being born with what looks like a mild, but undiagnosed and therefore not treated and not understood, case of Asperger's. Couple that with his powerful brain and the viciousness of children, and of adults who sometimes call genius stupidity - as they did with his father too - and you've got a childhood that's terribly painful. It affects a person forever. And here he is today, successful and achieving, and loving his God with a rare and striking purity, one that brought him back around to forgiving and loving his fellow humans.

Pretty Lady, Granny J, Cindi, Sassy Sistah, John McCann, KessKennis, Little Miss Attila, Kirsten Namskau, Bane, LL, Catfish, Mickysolo, Misty, oh the list goes on and on, I have to stop.

These are just a few of the ones who instantly spring to my mind, Snog Dot. Just a few.

I don't mean we never react badly to our hardships. We don't suffer by choice, and I bet most or all of us have shared these: depression, anger, fear, despair, denial, greed, anxiety, tears, self-pity, guilt, selfishness, unreasonableness, spitefulness. And that little thing called self-medicating. We are human and we're going to feel those human feelings and do those human things. It's not that we're immune to the less admirable side of life. The thing is, we go on, we come back up. We go to work on it and we make it through.

I think of the people I visit in the blogosphere and every single one I love the best has had some real trouble in their lives. I don't go along with the *comparative suffering* school of thought; any suffering is hard on people. None of these I mentioned, their experiences that I know about - meaning there's often far worse I don't know about - none of these are small. None are *minor.* All of them have experienced not just one isolated trouble, but a stream of it.

They didn't just make it through. They went way beyond. They are bloggers now and their writing and photos, their art - yes, of course it's art - shines with the beauty of the strength in their souls, the love of life that they kept intact throughout. They reach across the 'net, hands reaching out to me, hearts open, full of prayers and good thoughts and patient listening and kindness and comments. That's who I want to be like.

It still shocks me that people ever read my blog. It can't be easy sometimes. There are some difficult things here, hard to look at, hard to read. I love my life, but I need this blogtherapy too and here's where I let it out, the awful goes side by side with the flower pix.

Not long ago, there was an act - here in this tiny corner of the 'sphere - of such huge, such awesome gracefulness, that I still can't quite get my mind around it. When I almost lost my leg from walking too much, because my Medicare HMO wouldn't replace their defective scooter, these bloggers not only looked at the ugly photos of that leg, they got together in a whirlwind and raised so much money so fast that I could go and buy one of my own. My very own, that no one can ever take away from me again.

They were brave, too. They knew I would not want to allow this, and were ready to buy one on the sly and drop it on my doorstep so I couldn't say, *No.* If I hadn't been so close to losing my leg, or my life, from that infection, I would certainly have refused. Instead...they gave me back a great measure of safety, an incredible increase in my ability to get out and about, together with a gentle lesson in the art of accepting help. That's very hard for me to do and I need to learn how.

So much for cyber constructs. There are humans behind these constructs, every one, and these ones are beautiful humans indeed.

And I have my Walter now. That miracle of meeting him has lasted for 14 years, more miracles keeping us together and keeping us both alive. I watch him, too, who's had his share of hardships and tragic losses, and is more patient and calm today than he's ever been in his life.

Instead - you see - instead of the other way around.

So. Easy answer, Jack. My worst is long over. How do I keep on going now? Simple.

Because of you.