My last post appeared here exactly one month and one day a year ago. The poem I wrote on that day pretty much describes what this past year has been like, filled with dental difficulties, lower back and joint pain, worsening my of hiatal hernia and GERD, and struggling with such existential issues as what the hell is the point of my being here at all at age 86.

Complicating my struggles even further is the fact that I fractured my right ankle badly four months ago, resulting in three separate surgeries and bouts in and out of rehab.

Currently, I am wearing one of those Star Wars-looking orthopedic boots on my right leg and a lift contraption on my right shoe to level out the length of my legs to enable walking. Yeah, right. It’s like trying to walk with a shoe box on each foot. So I have to use a walker to keep upright.

So, I have spent the past for months pretty much homebound with my foot elevated and my daughter taking on the exhausting role of caregiver — giving me my meals, my meds, and whatever access to the outside world that I need to have, including trips to the doctors and careful forays onto the deck in the backyard (weather permitting).

I can’t help looking at this as the beginning of the end, because from now on, it’s only going to be one thing after the other, as my assorted healers keep track of my chronic kidney disease, the damage to my digestive system, and the need for pain management of my back and knee.

In the past, I never thought about how long I might live, since my life was always filled with distractions from hard realities — fun hobbies, good friends, and variety of other interests. Now I often think about dying — when, how, why — and whether I’ll ever again have a compelling reason to keep the end at bay.

Right now, it’s like I barely exist on any kind of meaningful level.

Back in the old Blogger days, many of those folks made the point that blogging was a way to write themselves into existence.

So here I am, again, attempting to write myself back into existence, trying to find a point to it all, after all. Hoping to find a desire for desire.