Life is a Cocktail of Unknown Ingredients

I fucking knew it. All of it.

Call it a premonition, call it anxiety, call it an assessment of the facts.

From day one, I knew I would lose you early.

In fact, we discussed it the first week we were dating. Because we discussed everything. My two biggest concerns before we went any further with this relationship.

Anxiety Number 1: Future Plans

One was easily assuaged. Yes, despite your age and a previous 12-year childless marriage, you wanted kids.

Despite your age.

Anxiety Number 2: Death

Because that spoke to my second concern, one that wasn’t so easily satisfied or dismissed.

You’re 12 and a half years older than me. Not an unheard of age difference. It didn’t worry me because I thought we were in different places in life or wouldn’t have enough in common. It worried me because men die earlier than women anyway and we had a 12-year disadvantage on the statistics.

I knew you had a lot of health problems. If our lives are like cocktails, you were the lucky recipient of some shitty ingredients like rare genetic diseases, complications, and bad luck (and a weird affinity for Grand Marnier). Both your parents died young. You could fill 57 forms with your family medical history.

And of course, the elephant in the room. Your size.

We’ve been conditioned by society to view fat as unhealthy. If you’re fat you must have no self-control. It must be your fault. You probably have diabetes and high cholesterol and will probably have a heart attack from all those cheeseburgers you can’t stop eating. As some have said, cruelly, insensitively, inaccurately, you never see an old fat person.

I could write pages and pages on that topic. Others have published entire internets worth of research and analysis on the reality of life as a fat person, what makes people gain or maintain weight, and fat stigma, even within the medical community. (If you’re interested in it, start with the work of Your Fat Friend.)

You never had diabetes, a fact that never ceased to surprise the medical residents you saw. Didn’t have high cholesterol. The illness that ultimately led to your death was unrelated to heart disease. But how many people assumed that when you died, it was directly related to your weight?

Only one person was brazen enough to say it to my face. “I’ve been telling him to lose weight for years,” she said. As though it were simply a matter of saying, “You’re right, I WILL lose weight! I never thought of that. Now all of my health problems will be solved.”

Your weight didn’t give you any of your genetic or rare diseases or the complications that came with them. But to say that your weight was irrelevant also isn’t true.

From what I understood, and what you told me, your size was an additional complication on top of everything else. If the diseases and their side effects filled up most of the glass, your size was the salt on the rim.

Anxiety Number 3: It’s My Fault

Which brings me to another one of my core anxieties. That your death could have been prevented, either by you or by me. If only you’d made more of an effort to lose weight. If only we’d spent fewer nights cuddling on the couch with delivery. If only I’d nagged you more. If only I’d cooked more.

If only, if only, if only. It’s how we make futile attempts at controlling our lives. It’s one of the best methods we have to torture ourselves.

The funny thing about if onlies is we don’t actually know, do we? We could have done all those things and had the same result.

Man Plans, God Laughs

We pretend we have complete control over our lives and our deaths. Over our health. That’s why hardcore conservatives believe they shouldn’t have to pay for other people’s healthcare - because your bad health is simply the result of your poor choices in life, right?

What I’m beginning to believe, despite me being a person with lifelong control issues, is that what we can control is only the garnish on top. A mysterious bartender offers us a unique and murky cocktail made up of genetics and circumstance and the limits of medical science, and just goddamn luck. We can eat “healthy” (whatever that means based on ever-changing research and fads) and work out and go to the doctor and we still might get cancer or die in a car accident. Or get a massive infection that causes sepsis and liver failure despite going to the hospital immediately upon having symptoms.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to make our lives better and longer. We should go to doctors and wear seatbelts and eat vegetables. But we’re kidding ourselves if we believe we are in control of the ultimate outcome and that it’s our fault if our bodies fail us.

We don’t know what’s in that cocktail. It’s handed to us, and we either drink it or we don’t.

So I went for it. I spent three years with the best man I have ever known. They were the best three years of my life. We planned a life and a future with no guarantee that we would receive it. And we didn’t. As the Yiddish proverb says, “Man plans, God laughs.”

I know this now to a gutting degree, but I think I knew it all along. I knew some of the ingredients in his cocktail and I knew he was likely to die long before me. But I drank it anyway. I don’t know if I believe in God. But I know that I don’t want to live life based on what might or might not happen. Because we have no clue what will happen.

Would I Do It Again?

If 29-year-old Pam knew what 32-year-old Pam knows, would she still have gone for it? She’s different than me, more nervous and more optimistic, but I think she would. Because 32-year-old Pam has no regrets about her life with Don.

These have been the worst 3 months of my life. And I would do it again. Fuck.

I’m going to continue to plan. God may continue to laugh. But I’d rather have shared a drink with Don than still be at home avoiding love and avoiding pain.

“To nights we’ll never remember, to friends we’ll never forget.” - Don

It was a wild adventure with a breathtaking view. See you on the other side, baby. I'll have some stories for you. Cheers.