Drew me like a moth to a windshield....see I have been thinking of the dead women in my life.  In 4 months I lost my mother, my maternal grandmother and my sister.   September, October and January.  Singularly these events are easier to deal with, when they gang up on me it makes my head hurt.  I keep coming back to them, here and there in the quiet moments.  I'll pull off a little piece and deal with it for awhile until I've taken the emotions out of it. 

But there is this one piece,  that looms large, and is sort of the binding agent that ties these three deaths together, more so then family does.  They all smoked heavily, and they would all be here today if they hadn't.  I have one sister left, and she has smoked since she was 15, I have never smoked.

My mother smoked until the last two years of her life, stopping  when she was found unconscious on the floor of her home after a fall,  she went into a nursing home where she never got out of bed or took a breath of her own power again.   She died just a few days before her 77th birthday.

My sister literally smoked until she died.  She was found on the floor of her bedroom, with her oxygen tubes off.  The speculate that she had removed it to have a cigarette, and it fell to the floor.  Since she couldn't go more than a few minutes without oxygen they think she passed out trying to retrieve them.  This was a woman who had only been home a few weeks after having a heart attack, on top of diabetes.  She was 56.

My grandmother had managed to quit smoking several years ago, but the damage had been done and her lungs couldn't keep up. She was 83.  (She was my Grandfathers 3rd wife, and was only a few years older then my mom, but the only Grandmother I had ever known)

For most of my life I was vehemently anti-smoking.  If I knew you and you smoked, you couldn't stand being around me, and a few people I didn't know couldn't stand me either.  Then I lost a good friend of mine to a heart attack and I was hit by a car while out running.  That period in my life changed my outlook, and for awhile I decided that if someone enjoyed smoking enough to trade years off of their lives for it, who was I to tell them they couldn't.  Then my mom went into the nursing home, both my sisters health started to fail as did my grandmother's.  I saw first hand what their addiction did to their bodies, and their loved ones. I saw their quality of life decline until thoughts of how they would be better off dead crept into my head where they and guilt would careen around inside my head like those motorcycle riders inside the giant drum.  Even now I don't know which bothers me more, what smoking did to me or what it did to them.

So that's the part I keep working on the smoking part and am I pissed for what it took from them or pissed for what it took from me.  Or just pissed that they didn't care enough about the rest of us to stop?

I rented a carpet cleaner today. You see I have a cat that is older then Yoda, 16 or 17, I've lost track. He spends a lot of time sleeping, like most beings his age do. Then he'll rouse himself, head to the bathroom where I keep his litter box and food. He has trouble with both. The food he doesn't keep down, and the litter follows him from room to room. Markings on the wall, foot prints in gray outlines on the bathroom tile, the toilet seat. He won't drink from anything but the toilet. He's taken over that bathroom, it can seem like a walk on the beach going in there. The 'clumping' litter sprayed around, flecking the tiles.

It's because he barfs up 1 in 3 meals, not to mention the hair balls, and he loses hair like someone undergoing chemo, that I needed to clean my carpet. The splotches of yellow were everywhere. (I do have a spot cleaner, lest you think I'm not a total slob)

I dragged all of the move-able furniture out of the room, picking up the plastic mat under my office chair, I do a lot of work from home. That was when I noticed what the carpet used to look like. The rest of the room was sort of beige with brown specs. Under the plastic mat it looked white with brown specs. I had not noticed the accumulation of dirt before.

Looking at the stark contrast, it was very different, the color under that mat, I wondered how I could not notice the change? How had this day in and day out accumulation of dust, dirt, kitty litter, dog fur, cat fur, even the horses contribution gone unnoticed? Then I wondered how many other things in my life had been covered over by the day to day grime of living life, and I just never noticed. If I could lift some metaphorically mat in my life and see things how they were to my younger self, before the dust and grime of day to day living over all of these years had been trampled into the very warp and woof of my life.

What would I see? would it be so different? Am I so different? or have I not changed? This evoloving/mutating/metamorphis that I think I've undergone what if it isn't reality? Wouldn't that really suck if I'm no different?