And so I drink to stay warm and to kill selected memories

I'm back from weeks of soul-searching, coming to conclusions about life in general and realizing that life really is too mysterious to take serious.

Watching a person die changes you forever. I’ve always feared death for as long as I can remember - the idea of not-existing. My family has always lived in denial. As my mother started to age, she would occasionally joke about death. That’s the only way the subject of death would ever enter a conversation in my family.

My sister would lie on the ground with her hands holding a flower clasped over her chest and her eyes half open and I would freak out. Or my mother would sing "Amazing Grace" in this eerie voice and I would get scared and make her stop. But real conversations about death weren’t permitted. Conversations that might involve the real wishes to be set forth in the event of an untimely death were replaced with jokes.

When my mother quickly went downhill and was no longer mentally capable of making decisions, we were faced with making them for her and we were unprepared to make them. We had to guess what she would want, which has now led to a stream of second-guessing. When I go to sleep at night, I’m haunted by the what-ifs. This hasn't, however, opened my mind to the idea of planning for the future of non-existance. Offers for life insurance come in the mail and are quickly ripped up and thrown away and my car knows to avoid any street where a mortuary is located.

So I attempt to be shallow. I’ve been shopping a lot, searching for the ultimate Manolo Blahnik shoes, or over-priced shirts from Anthropology and Urban Outfitters, or Dolce and Gabbana and Betsey Johnson. Being shallow allows me to stay away from being deep, since depth of soul leads to thoughts of death and the meaning of life which I’ve now concluded is meaningless. I’ve lost weight and I bake in the sun to take my mind off things so even though I’m more stressed than ever, I’m told how great I look. As Fernando Lamas used to say, "It's better to look good, than to feel good." But in the darkness, I have nightmares about my mother, or nuclear war, or terrorism, or even worse, Bush in 2004. So I try to keep my mind off of things like this which can really start me ranting. I just change the subject in my head to something like the newest episode of "Sex & the City" until the old me who really does give a shit returns.