<< prev = comments [24] = pings [0] = next >>


fighting for air
06/28/2009 = 07:33 AM

Back in days of yore, when the economy was decent and I had time to post online, sometimes more than once a day, even before I was your online source for all cute kittens because Cute Overload, 'Splode From Cute, and LOLCATS had not yet been invented, I happened across the Diaryland diary of a woman who was about to undergo a double mastectomy.

The post I read was a list of uses for your old bras once you don't have boobs anymore.

I don't remember every suggestion on the list, but when I read the one where she said to paint them brown and wear them over your ears as a Princess Leia disguise, I said to myself, Self, this is a lady I would like to know better.

Her online name was cosmicrayola, which later got shortened to cosmic, which was just as well, because instead of thinking of the Crayolas (like crayons, which was what she meant), my brain kept putting the glottal stop after the second C, and I would interpret her name as "Cosmic Ray Ola."

At the time I discovered her, she was collecting tube tops to wear post-op, and I didn't have any, because putting my body into a tube top would probably look something like a stress ball cinched around the middle by a rubber band.

I did start reading her diary, though, and eventually, we became online buddies, then online family, then we met in person, and now I consider her to be one of my closest friends.

The real life meetup took place some three years after we had first crossed diary paths, and we sat at a lunch table at Royal Palace in New Haven, then, after lunch, at a continental breakfast table in the lobby of the Courtyard Marriott. At both tables, Cosmic held court over all of us present, regaling us with silly humor along the same lines as repurposing support garments as Hallowe'en hairpieces.

That meeting was about a thousand days, give or take, after she told us that her doctor was making her quit smoking for a medical procedure and she didn't know if she could do it.

I smoked then, too, quite happily, but if a friend of mine needed backup, I would represent, and when she crushed out her last cigarette, I followed suit.

After her procedure, Cosmic started smoking again, but I stayed quit.

One of the ways I stayed on track was to put a Javascript counter at the bottom of my blog. I took comfort in each day that the number of smoke-free days would increase and used the fear of having to start that ever-increasing number over again from zero to keep me on the wagon.

On June 22nd, 2009, I noticed that my counter was up to 2,500, and I wrote a proud post about my accomplishment.

Four days after that ridiculous bit of braggadocio, Cosmic's husband, Terry, posted on her page that Cosmic's years of cigarette indulgence have caught up with her.

Furthermore, she has told him she's too tired and frustrated to keep fighting for air, and has refused to be placed on a ventilator.

Cosmic doesn't have long for this planet. I imagine it's only a matter of a few days before we see another post from Terry telling us that it's finished.

I am fantastically annoyed at having given up cigarettes only to be left crying so hard that now my lungs are just as full of crap as they used to be every morning when I woke up.

I would give anything in the world to be able to tell this to Cosmic. Under any other circumstances, she's the sort of person who would get a huge kick out of the irony.

UPDATED 06/29/09: We lost our Cosmic last night. She was 56.

On her last documented-online birthday, June 17, 2008 (she missed this year due to being hospitalized), she said, "I'm double-nickels now. Ah, well. It beats the alternative."

May the alternative be pain-free, and if there is an afterlife, I hope you tell Fred Travalena some of your silly jokes.

Tags: death

drinking: coffee
listening to: The Voidoids, Time
my favorite recent verizon commercial: the one with the piñata. the mom and juma will understand why