Fairness

Hmm, let's see... quick status update: Attitude, great. Energy, varies. Walking, awful.

I had to use one of those little motorized carts at the supermarket the other day. It was fun, the most fun I've had in a market in weeks (months?) because there was no suffering, struggling on my feet from aisle to aisle. Getting the goods into the car, and then from the car to the house... thank God for my wife. It'd probably have taken me at least an hour to do it myself.

I did the dishes this morning, and had to sit down to rest twice during the process; the first time I had to take a break, I was quite literally bent double as I hobbled to the chair to sit down and rest.

As I'm watching my locomotor (and other motor) abilities drizzling away, I'm thinking... now, which of us will this not happen to? We're all on the same road, on which we watch things we used to do float away on the river of memory... we just walk it (or hobble it, or wheel it) on our own schedule.

In one particularly tenderly-told story, Neil Gaiman's character Death comes to "collect" some obscure sort-of-superhuman character who had been given an unusually long life: several hundred year's worth. He protests when she comes to get him, saying that it wasn't fair, he was supposed to have more time.

"It is fair," she told him. "You got precisely what everyone else gets."

"A lifetime."

So, my walking time may be ending (for now, at least; MS being what MS is, it might--or might not--come back, who knows?), but I certainly don't feel cheated, or anything like that. After all, I get what everyone gets. You get to use it... for a while. And then it goes, when it goes.

And boy, I really did enjoy it.

But frankly, I got enough to do right now, keeping myself upright when I do walk. I have not the time, energy, or interest in bemoaning my loss.

And that is a very interesting gift of MS.