69
Mood:  not sure
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In September 2007, I will complete 69 years and enter my 70th. This seems improbable considering that in this millennium, I've lost in quick succession my father, my only son, and my youngest brother and among them only my father could be said to have faded away the natural way.

My son died of accidental asphyxiation at the age of 42 and my youngest brother of cardiac arrest during sleep at the age of 48.

I've been a heavy smoker, drink regularly, have had an angioplasty 16 years ago, and I have to manage my high blood pressure and diabetes with regular medication. The probabilities are all loaded against my living longer than I've lived.

I won't defend my addictions, but don't regret them either. I put them down to my deepest and strongest addiction: the addiction to life itself and the hope to be able to love and be loved by the other, to be able to find and savor joy and happiness.

I've also suffered a mental collapse recently. It started with the trauma of my son's sudden death in November 2003 and my postponed mourning of a loss that stared me in the face.

Instead of giving an outlet to my inner feelings, I went into an overdrive that resulted in bipolar disorder: a manic-depressive condition that almost pushed me over the edge of sanity and into self-imposed isolation.

I'm still here and writing because medication and a sad wisdom that signals the beginning of old age helped me gain a new kind of balance, however precarious it may still be.

 

It may be only an illusion, but I think and feel I know who I am. 

In fact, I always felt that way until my mind cracked under its own stresses and it took 65 years of a turbulent life full of adventures and uncertainty to happen. It was the first time that I could take no more of life the way I had taken it since my early adolescence.

It was a passionate and intense life and I took it seriously with my self-belief seldom shaken. My work reflects the peaks of awareness that I ascended as well as the downturns and fall that I periodically experienced. I started out as a poet, then branched out into writing prose, painting, making films, and doing anything else that satisfied my seemingly insatiable curiosity about life, my own and that of other human beings. I believed in learning from my own experience and in my ability to shape or re-shape my life in its light.

A slow process of distancing myself from memory has now begun. It is not the fading out of personal memory. I hope it is not yet the effect of aging on my cerebral functioning. It is now turning into something impersonal---a history of sorts, or even an archeology of the self.

Is this something new? Perhaps not. Am I someone new---different from what I used to be, as though a vital continuity has been suddenly ruptured? That's the question I find myself asking these days; and I hope I will have to go on working.

As Ludwig Wittgenstein memorably said, " A question is like an illness; it needs to be healed."