On Being Afraid, and Sad Birthdays

 I've been feeling generally crappy, tired and achy, far out of anything that passes for a routine.  A couple of days ago looked from what I was reading because my head felt a little weird and I was seeing double.  It's happened twice now with a spread of two years between.  Each time my eyes refocused, but not right away.  The interval, though probably less than a minute, seemed an eternity.

I'm starting the series of tests that will likely reveal nothing, as they did before.  I hope in some ways that's not the case.  I need to know what's causing this.  My greatest fear as I age is to lose my mental ability and thereby lose my self.  I know dying is inevitable.  I know at seventy that the day will come sooner than later.  What I dread most is living in an aging body with a damaged mind.

(I wrote the stuff above about a week ago.  Tests are still in progress, all negative thus far.  I'm feeling better but not great.)

Today is October 24th, my older son Jason's forty-sixth birthday.  He is geographically closest of my children (two sons, two stepdaughters) by far, being about forty minutes away, but I have seen him only once in a dozen years and that was at his brother's in Louisiana.  I am pretty sure I've mentioned him before in these musings.  As each year passes, as we both age, I wonder if I will ever be able to get reacquainted with him, whether he will, with age, somehow want to get to know me as I want to know him.  Every year his birthday makes me sad because I know that's one less year, one less chance, that we will meet as friends, father and son, or just sit for a while and talk as strangers who could become friends.

I've learned that it does me no good to catalogue and dwell on all the ways I didn't know how to be his father, but it's still hard not to look for that one instance in our sparse relationship that shut the door.  I wish I knew what it was.