TELLING TIME BY YOUR PILL BOXES

 

 We older folks (not ready to say "elders" yet) find that time flies by in a way that leaves us gasping, as if a large and threatening wave had just thrown us onto a beach. "WHAAA?" I say to Rick. "How can it be Friday? It was Monday the last time I looked." And so it goes, both of us looking at each other with disbelief, un-tethered in time, un-moored in our weeks.

 

 But here's a nifty trick: Make sure your pill organizer is filled to the brim with all of your pills (75 per week by my last count, many supplements but also lots of prescription drugs) for the week.  Each cheeky and bright part is labeled, "Monday, Tuesday," etc. etc. All you have to do is insert the pills for "Morning, Noon, and Evening." Then you are set to go, almost like "Easy Rider," motoring through your week with a satisfying and exciting roar. Not.

 However, filling these babies takes damn forever! I have to pull out my rolling kitchen chair with a back, and then push the lever which raises it to kitchen height.

 (Another handy tip: those who love cooking and not standing can use these chairs for kitchen prep, chopping, slicing, even stirring a pan on your stove.) Pull the many, many pill bottles towards you, and divide them into Morning, Noon, and Night. Once the containers are full, you can close them with a satisfying "Click!" knowing your ass is covered, that everything you need is there (except hope, love, charity, compassion, generosity, faith, self-control, and patience) when you need it.

 Now, all you must do is remember to take your pills! I keep mine in a handy-dandy organizer with a black cover which has a velcro fastener. Amazon, of course.

 But here's the thing: as I go through my days, swallowing my many capsules, I sense I am using up my time and my time is using up me. Or, as my beloved Jorge Luis Borges once wrote, "You have used up the time and it has used up you/ and still, you have not written the poem." 

 

 I have as many unwritten poems within as I have pills in my organizer. I'd better get damn busy, because the days are flying by, the weeks are roaring by, and my time is running out. But then--as I read in a reflection by Fr. George Smiga in "Living With Christ", a Catholic lectionary,

there was a man with stage 4 un-treatable cancer. He bought a simple pine coffin to keep his mortality front and center. As he planed the wood and smoothed it with one hand, his heart settled within.

 All of the pricks and pins of daily living--people who cut him off in traffic, family members who could not find the right words for his condition--(Don't I know this! "You are strong! You will beat this! You look great for someone with cancer! You don't look sick.")--all of it just fell away. He wrote inside the coffin lid in the place where his head would be, these marvelous words: "I have loved the stars so fondly that I cannot be afraid of the dark."

 Amen, sister, amen and amen!